4 ms·

"on web usage". What a joke.

acqq 16y ago
Yes, it's obvious they simply saved all the unencrypted packets they were able to get. If your your e-mail server didn't have encrypted communication, they saved your mails and your passwords. And yes, anybody else could have done that with your unsecured WiFi packets. The difference here is the large scale of collection and the power of the collector. The chance for misuse would be mostly by having it in wrong hands, but there's already immense amount of data on Google that would be of the same nature. If you use them you better trust them. My much bigger worries are that people don't see problem in sites like Facebook asking the passwords of your e-mail accounts to "connect you with your friends." And people do this gladly!
- drivebyacct 16y ago
  The Wifi channel was changing 5 times per second. The microscopic fragments they got weren't usable. The tiny possibility that you were sending sensitive data, multiplied times the tiny possibility that it wasn't SSL, multiplied times the very small possibility that it was grabbing enough information to get a full frame, let alone a handshake seems very unlikely. If Google had this massive mountain of my personal traffic lying around, I think they'd have a hard time "accidentally" stockpiling all of it. I was mostly mocking the word choice anyway. "Web Usage". The worst allegation is that they logged actual packets or traffic, which I still find unlikely. I did find it interesting that that particular part of the detail was left out of Google's otherwise very informative blog post about this incident.
  - borism 16y ago
    802.11g network can broadcast 33.75Mb during 5 seconds. That's quite a few e-mails.
    - drivebyacct 16y ago
      "5 times per second" and "The tiny possibility that you were sending sensitive data, multiplied times the tiny possibility that it wasn't SSL, multiplied times the very small possibility that it was grabbing enough information to get a full frame, let alone a handshake seems very unlikely."

acqq 16y ago

Yes, it's obvious they simply saved all the unencrypted packets they were able to get. If your your e-mail server didn't have encrypted communication, they saved your mails and your passwords. And yes, anybody else could have done that with your unsecured WiFi packets. The difference here is the large scale of collection and the power of the collector. The chance for misuse would be mostly by having it in wrong hands, but there's already immense amount of data on Google that would be of the same nature. If you use them you better trust them. My much bigger worries are that people don't see problem in sites like Facebook asking the passwords of your e-mail accounts to "connect you with your friends." And people do this gladly!

drivebyacct 16y ago
The Wifi channel was changing 5 times per second. The microscopic fragments they got weren't usable. The tiny possibility that you were sending sensitive data, multiplied times the tiny possibility that it wasn't SSL, multiplied times the very small possibility that it was grabbing enough information to get a full frame, let alone a handshake seems very unlikely. If Google had this massive mountain of my personal traffic lying around, I think they'd have a hard time "accidentally" stockpiling all of it. I was mostly mocking the word choice anyway. "Web Usage". The worst allegation is that they logged actual packets or traffic, which I still find unlikely. I did find it interesting that that particular part of the detail was left out of Google's otherwise very informative blog post about this incident.
- borism 16y ago
  802.11g network can broadcast 33.75Mb during 5 seconds. That's quite a few e-mails.
  - drivebyacct 16y ago
    "5 times per second" and "The tiny possibility that you were sending sensitive data, multiplied times the tiny possibility that it wasn't SSL, multiplied times the very small possibility that it was grabbing enough information to get a full frame, let alone a handshake seems very unlikely."