Oopsie! Google Accidentally Harvested WiFi Data

yeah..finally caught and now they decide to call it a mistake. but it was only from non-secured wifi. anyone can get info off that so who cares. I guess if you don't want people carelessly taking your network info then its a good idea to use a bit of security encryption! Derrrr.

this doesn't really bother me cause lets be realistic if google want to fuck u over u think ur wifi password is gonna stop them. I'll just let the paranoid people take this one.

All of them collect data about us, its how they make money!

I call BS.

I kan has ur deytuh?

I'm still slightly confused as to how this seems so 'bad' when anyone could do it to any network if they were close enough...

Anyone one else just plain not trust Google anymore? This combined with them keeping your search (and advertising) data for 3 years is just plain creepy.
Also, it pays to remember that EVEN IF your wifi is secured, google still recorded the MAC address of your router.

Interesting. So they did collect it after all.

Which means my Google has my network's SSID as well...

this is a good lesson for everyone to encrypt their connection and to use a password.
i could do the same and noone could blame me bacause they are BROADCASTING and VOLUNTARILY sharing their data. there's a choice that makes a big difference.

I laugh at those of you who still trust Google. Ha Ha Ha!!!

still don't know what payload data is..

When a company harvest private data then publish it for profit it not only break the law but also indecent. It looks like Google will do anything it feel like to make money until it got caught. An apology will be good enough from the richest company on earth.

"yeah..finally caught and now they decide to call it a mistake."
Only they weren't actually caught by anyone but themselves but still went public with it and asked for a third-party review of the handling.

Can you think of any company that would do the same under similar circumstances? Neither can I.

The Google fright is vastly overrated and entirely unjustified, at least on a factual basis. Google no doubt has the means to screw us over royally with the kind of information they are sitting on, yet we get news pieces like these when they openly admit to mistakes, apologize and ask for outside review.

Would you prefer they kept us in the dark, lied to us and secretly abused any and all information instead?

Google is taking War Driving to another level.

I don't know why router software doesn't just disable ssid publication after a setup was run... it's useless and dangerous

There is no privacy on the web.

Hardly surprising, we all know Google respects privacy about as much as a hungry cow respects my lawn...

Every time I use a Google product, there's this little voice in the back of my head telling me I'm using a product that monitors me more than anything else, including the so called 'nanny state'. Too bad many of their products still don't have an equal competitor.

Chrome? Opera is as fast (slightly faster according to some), yet lacks extensions. FF has all the nice extensions, but lacks the blazing speed. Bing still doesn't give results as meaningful as Google does. Gmail is better browser integrated than hotmail.

Even collecting only MAC addresses is sketchy. If that is connected to google earth/street view then one could find out where you lived based on information in packets. Piss the wrong person off and they might come knocking on your door. If they come to my town (luckily it's rather small so they may not bother) I'ma turn off my access point and put a big-ass mirror in front of my house.

"Hardly surprising, we all know Google respects privacy about as much as a hungry cow respects my lawn..."

While it's healthy to question the security of integrity of data-harvesting there's one major difference between Google and anyone else. Namely, Google is honest about it.

Also, they've never actually been caught doing anything untoward with the data which is quite impressive considering their size, mindshare and skepticism shown by people such as yourself.

So in the end we 'know' nothing but what we've actually seen or heard and judging Google by those merits they're probably the most stand-up company of their size anywhere.

On another note, for those wondering, payload data refers to what most would simply term 'data'. In other words the actual information transferred as opposed to header data that only contain the source and destination of the data, it's type, length and checksum etc.

"Even collecting only MAC addresses is sketchy. If that is connected to google earth/street view then one could find out where you lived based on information in packets."

And why on earth would they publish any information that they collected, allegedly as a mistake, and tie it into street addresses for the general public to search through?

Even the frothing-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists must realize something like that would never float.

Look, both rival companies and several government agencies, of multiple nations, have been trying to find dirt on Google _for years_. The fact that they've yet to do so is nothing short of astonishing, and yet people come up with the most absurd ideas regarding the company.

As I remarked earlier, skepticism is a good thing but it can be easily pushed into paranoia.

@ Exodite4: They collected SSID's and MACs intentionally according to their own statement as shown in the above article: "On April 27, Google sent out a technical note that stated that, while the Street View cars did collect publicly broadcast SSID information and MAC addresses,.."

I'm sure they would never publish that information for the general public to access, however that's not to say it still couldn't be leaked through a security breach. I'm just saying they shouldn't be collecting this information in the first place. What possible legitimate use could it have? Granted one could just change their SSID and secure their network, but changing your MAC means buying a new router/access point.

Is anyone else a little uneasy that they were collecting mac addresses and SSID information while mapping out said data's physical location?

This is the kind of thing scam artists and such wish they could have. To make scams more believable. (Hey i'm your neighbor by three blocks and I always noticed bla bla bla...so give me 100$ and all of your other info so I can forward 1million dollars to your account.)

But in all seriousness. If google decided to take over the world, the first step to domination is domination of the internet. Now they can hunt you down physically. By MAC address. No spoofing IP's will save us now!!1*tinfoil hat shaped like chrome symbol*

As the head of facebook would probably say, anyone who trusts what google says about them not making use of the data at all are dumb ffucks.

They are gonna have a new "WiFi Hotspots" Layer and show us all the open networks around the world so we know where to freeload