Google grabs personal info off of Wi-Fi networks

[zulchzulu]

Between Facebook snagging your privacy and others careless with privacy issues, fucking Google?

Google grabs personal info off of Wi-Fi networks

Google acknowledges collecting snippets of people's online activities broadcast over Wi-Fi

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google Inc. has been vacuuming up fragments of people's online activities broadcast over public Wi-Fi networks for the past four years, a breach of Web etiquette likely to raise more privacy worries about the Internet search leader.

Even Google was troubled by its behavior, and issued a public apology Friday. The company said it only recently discovered the problem in response to an inquiry from German regulators.

"Maintaining people's trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short," Alan Eustace, Google's top engineering executive, wrote in a blog post.

Google characterized its collection of snippets from e-mails and Web surfing done on public Wi-Fi networks as a mistake, and said has taken steps to avoid a recurrence. About 600 gigabytes of data was taken off of the Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries, and Google plans to delete it all as soon as it gains clearance from government authorities.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Google-grabs-personal-info-apf-2162289993.html/print?x=0

This is insane.

[msongs]

1. google is a ruthless data miner that puts up a good PR front as benign nt

[enlightenment]

2. "Gains clearance from government authorities" ??

What?

Why do they need clearance from government authorities to get rid of information they shouldn't have collected in the first place?

argh.

[Divine Discontent]

5. they want to follow the law...

BWAHAHAHAHA...

[Proud Liberal Dem]

6. Great response!!!

I was wondering the EXACT same thing!

How exactly did they "accidentally" collect the information in the first place, anyway???

:banghead:

[Quantess]

3. Wow, that's really bad.

That is a lot worse than what facebook has done, because at least they notified people first.

[Divine Discontent]

4. HUGE Rec#5! off to greatest for extreme big brother bullshit proving yet again....

Corporations do as they damned well please.

[Meldread]

7. Theory: Google did it for the government.

The US has already strong armed phone companies in an effort to tap phones, which was revealed under the Bush administration. Google is an expert in data mining, and it is likely the government pressured / asked / bribed / encouraged them to do this. So they were likely collecting the data for personal use as well as to pass it on to the government for their use. This is why they have to "gain clearance from government authorities" first.

Likely, they were about to get a PR black eye, and they came out ahead of the story. That's typically how you handle the PR in this type of situation.

[darkstar3]

8. I'm a big tin foil hat guy regarding Google, too,

but I gotta say I can see how this could have happened.

Google sends out vans around the world to do all kinds of mapping. Street Views, wi-fi hotspot tracking, and whole host of other "find me" shit is taken care of by these vans. Now, if you want to find a hotspot, you need a sniffer. If, as is the way with some IT people, you "use a sledgehammer to pick that lock" and go for the easiest, most configurable, and guaranteed accurate sniffer around, you could collect a whole lot of stuff as you drive by without even meaning to.

If I were to fire up one of these sniffers on my laptop and just hang out at Starbucks, I could watch everything everyone in the room was doing on non-https connections. THAT'S WHY YOU DON'T CHECK IMPORTANT SHIT AT STARBUCKS.

Anyway, I can definitely see how this could happen by accident. As for the government preventing them from deleting it, now it's proof in a possible FCC violation case, and they're not allowed to shred that proof until the case is dropped.

Now don't get me wrong, Google's pervasive nature on the internet is flat out scary sometimes, but working in IT as I do, I can see how this could have been accidental.