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Google snooping your WiFi? Don't panic.

14 points by billpg 16y ago

watty 16y ago
preaching to the choir...
- billpg 16y ago
  Yep, I wrote it for lay-people, which I why I use "WiFi identity" rather than "MAC address". I was just so happy with it I had to post a link here. (I'm so vain. I probably think Hacker News is about me.)
ugh 16y ago
The sarcasm and glee displayed in the German media (and by German politicians) was quite intolerable when Google admitted their mistake. Everybody seemed to take it for granted that malign intent – not a screw up – was the reason why Google recorded the WiFi data. It’s true that you need to have a good understanding of various very technical issues but that’s not a excuse for leaving your viewers (and voters) in the dark and gleefully suggesting that malign intent could be a good explanation for what Google did. What Google did was most likely illegal, it was also a pretty bad screw up on Google’s part but it is very unlikely that Google intentionally recorded the data. That just doesn’t seem like a good explanation. Why do I (as someone who has some understanding of the technical issues involved but not a very deep one) have to read in blogs about good probable explanations? (I read another very good and quite similar German blog post on the topic [1].) Why don’t I find something like that anywhere else in the media? (I must say, though, that the German Google spokespeople who were interviewed seemed pretty bad at explaining the issue at hand. Maybe just quote mining, but they didn’t look good in front of the camera.) [1] http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/2860-Wie-man-aus-Versehen-WLAN-Daten-mitschneidet.html http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/2860-Wie-man-aus-Versehen-... (German)
- ahoyhere 16y ago
  Compare and contrast this to the US news media's treatment of Toyota, a company that otherwise has had an amazing safety track record. People in the US, and the media, are extremely sympathetic to major corporations. The European look is entirely the opposite. That's why EU countries have so many wonderfully solid consumer protection laws.
jschuur 16y ago
Great write up. I would perhaps add a comment about how they were scanning about 5 networks per second on average (per Google's blog post that spawned this story), so it's likely that only a fraction of a second of data being transmitted at that particular time was intercepted. A layperson may not even realize that it wasn't the contents of the machines on a wifi network that was being scanned, but a tiny amount of the traffic going across it.

14 points by billpg 16y ago

watty 16y ago

preaching to the choir...

billpg 16y ago
Yep, I wrote it for lay-people, which I why I use "WiFi identity" rather than "MAC address". I was just so happy with it I had to post a link here. (I'm so vain. I probably think Hacker News is about me.)

ugh 16y ago

The sarcasm and glee displayed in the German media (and by German politicians) was quite intolerable when Google admitted their mistake. Everybody seemed to take it for granted that malign intent – not a screw up – was the reason why Google recorded the WiFi data. It’s true that you need to have a good understanding of various very technical issues but that’s not a excuse for leaving your viewers (and voters) in the dark and gleefully suggesting that malign intent could be a good explanation for what Google did. What Google did was most likely illegal, it was also a pretty bad screw up on Google’s part but it is very unlikely that Google intentionally recorded the data. That just doesn’t seem like a good explanation. Why do I (as someone who has some understanding of the technical issues involved but not a very deep one) have to read in blogs about good probable explanations? (I read another very good and quite similar German blog post on the topic [1].) Why don’t I find something like that anywhere else in the media? (I must say, though, that the German Google spokespeople who were interviewed seemed pretty bad at explaining the issue at hand. Maybe just quote mining, but they didn’t look good in front of the camera.) [1] http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/2860-Wie-man-aus-Versehen-WLAN-Daten-mitschneidet.html http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/2860-Wie-man-aus-Versehen-... (German)

ahoyhere 16y ago
Compare and contrast this to the US news media's treatment of Toyota, a company that otherwise has had an amazing safety track record. People in the US, and the media, are extremely sympathetic to major corporations. The European look is entirely the opposite. That's why EU countries have so many wonderfully solid consumer protection laws.

jschuur 16y ago

Great write up. I would perhaps add a comment about how they were scanning about 5 networks per second on average (per Google's blog post that spawned this story), so it's likely that only a fraction of a second of data being transmitted at that particular time was intercepted. A layperson may not even realize that it wasn't the contents of the machines on a wifi network that was being scanned, but a tiny amount of the traffic going across it.