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> In 2010, Google acknowledged that its Street View Wi-Fi collection was a mistake. “We screwed up, and I’m not making excuses about it,” Google co-founder Serg
by baldfat 11y ago
> In 2010, Google acknowledged that its Street View Wi-Fi collection was a mistake. “We screwed up, and I’m not making excuses about it,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the time. “We do have a lot of internal controls in place, but obviously they didn’t prevent this error from occurring.”
That seems pretty upfront.
Well you really got that opposite from what I saw. It wasn't slurping any data that was protected behind a wall of privacy that Google climbed over but was public broadcast. I have always tried to let friends know that if they have WiFi they need to have an understanding what they are broadcasting. One time my friend had no passwords on his wifi and his Documents were being shared. I got the last three years of tax records sitting next to me. I did ask want me to look at downloads, videos or pictures. He blushed said no and we put up a password on his wifi and stopped sharing his data.
- ForHackernews 11y ago> That seems pretty upfront. Only in the exact way described by the parent: deceit couched as mistakes. Do you really honestly believe that they "accidentally" implemented a feature to associate with open wifi networks, grab any and all data they could, and store that data in their archive? Google is a big place. One or more people designed that feature, multiple people implemented it, probably dozens of others tested it, and managers signed off on it before it was deployed on their StreetView cars. It's not like "Whoops, someone left out a null check and it accidentally grabbed all your data!"
- baldfat 11y agoIt was one programmer that put in the code. Interesting read here but I still buy the one engineer theory. http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi-fi-data-report-but-it-actually-makes-google-look-worse/ http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi...
- dalke 11y agoIt says 'the project had sailed through an approval process.' That requires more than one engineer.
- ChrisClark 11y agoI also remember when it happened. Google put out a blog post about it when it was discovered, apologizing for having the logs turned on and promising to delete the data. It was only months later that suddenly websites were reporting on it, and then even more months before any governments decided to do anything about it. If Google hadn't made that blog post, I don't think anyone would have known about it in the first place.