4 ms·

"Accidentally" collected network packets (including traffic on the network, websites being visited, etc)..... whoops!

by jb775 6y ago

shadowgovt 6y ago
TBF to Google, that's something anyone can do. If a person really doesn't want their activities known, it's incumbent upon the person to not do those activities over an unsecured wifi network. That's the radio equivalent of shouting your browsing history in public. (This is one of the oldest privacy arguments and extends outside the radio spectrum. Philosophically, if you stand naked at your own bay window and I walk by on the street and chance to spy your genitals, and the fact they were seen bothers you, who screwed up here?)
- jb775 6y ago
  Well if I'm walking up to everyone's bay window taking nude pics of them, then saving the pics to a server that would eventually be linked up with their personal accounts....I certainly wouldn't claim it to be an "accident".
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    That's true! But it in no way describes what Google did with the raw packets they sniffed. A better analogy for what Google did was drive around, snap pics of everything, and realize they had some photos of nude people in the debug folder. (It's a better analogy for a couple reasons, one of them being that's actually a problem they continue to have to deal with in the non-debug folder. ;) I know they've automated the process of blurring faces; I wonder if they also have a nude body detection ML algorithm to identify keyframes of images taken that shouldn't make it through the quality-control hoppers to end up in Streetview?)
    - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
      So they say. Giving their track record, I don't see any reason to trust them about it.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        A company operating at their scale, with the amount of data they have collected, has the best track record of privacy I've seen to date, TBH. I can't think of any other. One can make the argument that the easiest way to maintain privacy is to not do anything; if you never collate data, nobody's privacy ever needs to be considered. That's the entropy answer; true and boring. If you never have an app, you don't have to care about security. If you never write software, you never have bugs. Discarding that null set of privacy scenarios, I observe Google's mistakes are far outstripped by the features and successfully-architected products and I can't think of anyone with a similar ratio of successes to mistakes.
        BiteCode_dev 6y ago
        It's like saying given how many people the US killed, they have the best war track record. Collecting data on us is not a feature.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        > It's like saying given how many people the US killed, they have the best war track record. Hard agree. Countries think twice before engaging the US in open military conflict. The US has a history of ending wars. The analogy breaks down a bit because people in general don't like war, but people in general do like turn-by-turn live navigation on their phones. > Collecting data on us is not a feature Not by itself; it's fuel for features. It's actually the raw fuel that power most of the breakthroughs in machine learning that have brought sci-fi tech to our fingertips. Gmail's spamblocker is built on cross-correlating spam signal from multiple inboxes. Google Ads' fraud detection is built on having enough of a sample of attempted fraud to know what fraud looks like in the abstract. Google Voice works because the company gained access to a massive library of real-world, low-quality voice samples via GOOG-411. Maps gets secondary traffic signal by having maps users ping-back the speed of the car, so it can detect where vehicles have started to crawl in what should be a high-speed area. And of course, search itself is powered by the extremely strong signal coming from people finding what they want via search. Big data collection and interpretation is the core of Google's business model, and it's worked great. People really enjoy the products Google has crafted by collecting data on us.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  I'm torn on this. On the one hand, yes, it's easy to see accidentally recording when they really didn't mean to. On the other hand, have you ever heard of Google recording less data or giving people more privacy by accident? If "mistakes" always favor one party then it seems fair to start blaming them. On the third hand, would you hear about that if it happened? I mean, what would that look like? "Oh, today's ads are slightly less targeted"? "Oh, Google location services doesn't automatically place me by my wifi WAP"? Negatives aren't just hard to prove; they're hard to see in the first place. So I'm skeptical, but I don't know how to have enough data to really be sure.
  - knorker 6y ago
    You mean has Google ever lost data? I'm sure it has. Has Google ever "undertargeted" ads? Obviously yes. Every single outage in an ads system makes it target less well, basically. And there was that time Ads preferences for basically everyone seemed to indicate that I (along with everyone I knew) was interested in "Raggeaton", whatever that is.

"Accidentally" collected network packets (including traffic on the network, websites being visited, etc)..... whoops!

by jb775 6y ago

"Accidentally" collected network packets (including traffic on the network, websites being visited, etc)..... whoops!

TBF to Google, that's something anyone can do. If a person really doesn't want their activities known, it's incumbent upon the person to not do those activities over an unsecured wifi network. That's the radio equivalent of shouting your browsing history in public. (This is one of the oldest privacy arguments and extends outside the radio spectrum. Philosophically, if you stand naked at your own bay window and I walk by on the street and chance to spy your genitals, and the fact they were seen bothers you, who screwed up here?)

jb775 6y ago
Well if I'm walking up to everyone's bay window taking nude pics of them, then saving the pics to a server that would eventually be linked up with their personal accounts....I certainly wouldn't claim it to be an "accident".
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  That's true! But it in no way describes what Google did with the raw packets they sniffed. A better analogy for what Google did was drive around, snap pics of everything, and realize they had some photos of nude people in the debug folder. (It's a better analogy for a couple reasons, one of them being that's actually a problem they continue to have to deal with in the non-debug folder. ;) I know they've automated the process of blurring faces; I wonder if they also have a nude body detection ML algorithm to identify keyframes of images taken that shouldn't make it through the quality-control hoppers to end up in Streetview?)
  - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
    So they say. Giving their track record, I don't see any reason to trust them about it.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      A company operating at their scale, with the amount of data they have collected, has the best track record of privacy I've seen to date, TBH. I can't think of any other. One can make the argument that the easiest way to maintain privacy is to not do anything; if you never collate data, nobody's privacy ever needs to be considered. That's the entropy answer; true and boring. If you never have an app, you don't have to care about security. If you never write software, you never have bugs. Discarding that null set of privacy scenarios, I observe Google's mistakes are far outstripped by the features and successfully-architected products and I can't think of anyone with a similar ratio of successes to mistakes.
      - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
        It's like saying given how many people the US killed, they have the best war track record. Collecting data on us is not a feature.
        shadowgovt 6y ago
        > It's like saying given how many people the US killed, they have the best war track record. Hard agree. Countries think twice before engaging the US in open military conflict. The US has a history of ending wars. The analogy breaks down a bit because people in general don't like war, but people in general do like turn-by-turn live navigation on their phones. > Collecting data on us is not a feature Not by itself; it's fuel for features. It's actually the raw fuel that power most of the breakthroughs in machine learning that have brought sci-fi tech to our fingertips. Gmail's spamblocker is built on cross-correlating spam signal from multiple inboxes. Google Ads' fraud detection is built on having enough of a sample of attempted fraud to know what fraud looks like in the abstract. Google Voice works because the company gained access to a massive library of real-world, low-quality voice samples via GOOG-411. Maps gets secondary traffic signal by having maps users ping-back the speed of the car, so it can detect where vehicles have started to crawl in what should be a high-speed area. And of course, search itself is powered by the extremely strong signal coming from people finding what they want via search. Big data collection and interpretation is the core of Google's business model, and it's worked great. People really enjoy the products Google has crafted by collecting data on us.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, yes, it's easy to see accidentally recording when they really didn't mean to. On the other hand, have you ever heard of Google recording less data or giving people more privacy by accident? If "mistakes" always favor one party then it seems fair to start blaming them. On the third hand, would you hear about that if it happened? I mean, what would that look like? "Oh, today's ads are slightly less targeted"? "Oh, Google location services doesn't automatically place me by my wifi WAP"? Negatives aren't just hard to prove; they're hard to see in the first place. So I'm skeptical, but I don't know how to have enough data to really be sure.
- knorker 6y ago
  You mean has Google ever lost data? I'm sure it has. Has Google ever "undertargeted" ads? Obviously yes. Every single outage in an ads system makes it target less well, basically. And there was that time Ads preferences for basically everyone seemed to indicate that I (along with everyone I knew) was interested in "Raggeaton", whatever that is.