Google Street view cars mistakenly snooped on private data

Ouch, Google is getting no love recently! They remind me of the rich child with all the cool toys that doesn't think about the consequences. No intended evil, just playing around...

Whoops! Google says mistakenly got wireless data | Reuters

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Comments

tiersten

Meh. Its your own fault if you're sending sensitive data over an unencrypted wireless connection!

veritas_libertas

tiersten wrote: »

Meh. Its your own fault if you're sending sensitive data over an unencrypted wireless connection!

Agreed, but I'm really surprised that they (Google) didn't think this through more carefully.

earweed

"Oops, we didn't realize we've been doing it for over 3 years now."
Edit That's not a quote from the article, just paraphrasing with an attempt at some light humor

tiersten

I assume their code was supposed to just grab the BSSID and discard the rest before saving it whilst in the car. The article mentions stuff about how it was part of an experimental project that got accidently included.

A guess but I'd say somebody left the debugging code enabled which had some kind of packet sniffer and whilst the data was being archived in the logs, nobody was using it and nobody thought to check.

cablegod

Do no evil my FOOT!

dynamik

I hate "tech" articles that don't provide any technical details. I'm also glad to see they made the most of Gibson's expertise. Only an expert could provide that level of insight...

veritas_libertas

I'm honestly surprised that they didn't think of this in the first place. I think 'confused' definitely sums up their actions. You would think that a huge company like Google would run these ideas past their lawyers first.

FT.com / Technology - Google stops deleting Street View WiFi data

I'm also glad to see they made the most of Gibson's expertise. Only an expert could provide that level of insight...

LOL

tiersten

dynamik wrote: »

I'm also glad to see they made the most of Gibson's expertise. Only an expert could provide that level of insight...

I'm still waiting for the internet to implode from the awesome power of raw sockets in Windows XP. Its okay though, Microsoft eventually removed it in SP2 so we're safe now! Crisis now averted he can continue to peddle his broken SYN cookie implementation and uber assembler TCP/IP stack.