Google grabs (600 gigabytes of) personal info off of Wi-Fi networks

[Newsjock]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Google says it has scooped up snippets of people's online activities broadcast over unprotected Wi-Fi networks during the past four years.

The admission made Friday is likely to raise more worries about potential privacy breaches as Google gathers volumes of personal information through its search engine and other services.

Google picked up fragments of e-mails and Web addresses while its cars were photographing neighborhoods for the "Street View" feature on its mapping service.

The company says it only recently discovered it has accumulated about 600 gigabytes of data transmitted over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries. Google says none of the information has appeared in its search engine or other services.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/05/14/financial/f135550D39.DTL&tsp=1

[TroglodyteScholar]

1. Wait, what?

"Only recently discovered..."? You don't gather information being transmitted over unsecured WIFI networks on fucking accident. What are they UP to?

[Tesha]

5. "Assisted GPS" uses WiFi network data to help locate you.

When you use the "Assisted GPS" on your phone or other mobile device,
one way it manages to determine your location *FAST* is to consider
which WiFi wireless networks you can see at that moment.

There are databases of all of the WiFi network "hot spots" worldwide
and one of the ways those databases were accumulated was to simply
drive around and listen to all the WiFi networks. Google did this as part
of their driving around collecting all those "Google Street View" photo-
graphs.

It appears that, in the process, they also managed to log some of the
data moving on those WiFi networks. That's interesting, but not
necessarily ominous; we'll see what they do from here on out.

Tesha

[TroglodyteScholar]

8. I still don't see how any actual DATA could get caught without it being purposeful.

"Seeing" an SSID and grabbing packets from whatever network uses that SSID are two very different things.

[Hav]

13. What I heard...

I was wondering about the same thing because it didn't make any sense.
What I heard was that, "accidentally" of course, some code from another project somehow slipped into the software which made it possible to access these additional informations...and they never realised it until now.
Whether this makes it more believable, that it was just a simple mistake and that they didn't know what they were doing, is another story though. The journalist who reported it, quite obviously had problems buying it.
Mistakes do happen while writing software, but you basically have to believe that they had some shitty programmers who only copy&pasted code.

[sailor65]

2. This is why I have refused to go to a Droid phone

The Android OS is inextricably tied into Google, and there are precious few ways to keep the info on the phone out of their hands.

[wtmusic]

3. Alright, that crosses the line

and sounds like a lawsuit in the making

[sharp_stick]

4. I can't believe that people

still have unsecured wifi networks. Just how dumb do you have to be in order to not turn on the basic security available? Not to condone what Google has done, but shit, people are stupid.

As I type this I look at the list here and see that I have at least 1 neighbor with an open network.

[hunter]

6. I talk in code to the people in the grocery store too.

dgtvci 43qhl; csxzkdsvcg .lgnfdjg podacn GTV9O5E 6YI8J4EV; DSMLS DSL

They always look at me kind of funny, but it's for everyone's mutual security.

[skyounkin]

7. That really made me laugh.

Nice!

[sharp_stick]

10. LOL

I love it when someone says something so unexpected that I actually have to laugh. Well done with that.

[onehandle]

9. Google... Facebook... Flash...

The Internet is just one big giant security threat.

[superconnected]

11. Why? A lot of those countries would probably consider that spying.

[klook]

12. Protect your network

It's not that hard.

Even better, protect and hide your network.