3 ms·

1) The Google that built Street View is not the soul-less, profit-and-shareholder-value-optimizing enterprise it is today. There is no chance they would greenl

1) The Google that built Street View is not the soul-less, profit-and-shareholder-value-optimizing enterprise it is today. There is no chance they would greenlight that project in 2022 if it didn't exist yet.

ethanbond 4y ago
They just happened to have a wardriver on a project that looked an awful lot like wardriving?
- foobarian 4y ago
  When you are doing an expensive operation such as putting a driver in the field traversing thousands of road miles, it makes sense to collect as much data as humanly possible from that platform instead of realizing later that there are certain things you wanted but can't repeat the driving easily. Or, you think of things to do with the data you never imagined before. The SSID collection only turned out controversial later, and they adjusted their data collection. I still don't really see a problem with it, TBH. You radiate into public space, you bear the consequences.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Yes this does make sense if you are, at bottom, an advertising company... in need of data... In which case your "putting a driver in the field traversing thousands of road miles" is called "wardriving." Walmart's fleet, for example, drives 700 million miles. How much data do you think they "accidentally" sniffed and recorded? I'll bet precisely zero bytes, because they are moving goods, and when that's a company's MO it makes no sense to have wardriving equipment or expertise involved.
    - foobarian 4y ago
      > How much data do you think they "accidentally" sniffed and recorded? I'll bet precisely zero bytes, because they are moving goods I'll bet dollars to donuts they track exactly where their vehicles go, and penalize drivers that exceed a certain deviation from the expected route/timing. Either way seem like perfectly legal things to do.
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        Uhhh, which is completely unrelated to what Google was doing? And hey I never claimed it was illegal. I just claimed it was a likely rationale, that’s what OP was asking about. Google’s famous motto: “Don’t get us fined too much.”
        foobarian 4y ago
        Right, also back to that original point: I could totally believe that a 2009 Google would run that project for other reasons than advertising, such as prestige or engineer-driven because they thought it was cool. I mean there are posts here from people who were part of the original project. Today a project like that would be beancounter-driven and only allowed if it had a clear short-term ROI. Did Street View have a positive ROI over time? I don't know. It certainly helped put Google Maps front and center. Maybe you can think of it as a very successful advertising campaign - instead of blowing millions on SuperBowl ads you blow millions on cars taking pictures of every public road mile.

ethanbond 4y ago

They just happened to have a wardriver on a project that looked an awful lot like wardriving?

foobarian 4y ago
When you are doing an expensive operation such as putting a driver in the field traversing thousands of road miles, it makes sense to collect as much data as humanly possible from that platform instead of realizing later that there are certain things you wanted but can't repeat the driving easily. Or, you think of things to do with the data you never imagined before. The SSID collection only turned out controversial later, and they adjusted their data collection. I still don't really see a problem with it, TBH. You radiate into public space, you bear the consequences.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Yes this does make sense if you are, at bottom, an advertising company... in need of data... In which case your "putting a driver in the field traversing thousands of road miles" is called "wardriving." Walmart's fleet, for example, drives 700 million miles. How much data do you think they "accidentally" sniffed and recorded? I'll bet precisely zero bytes, because they are moving goods, and when that's a company's MO it makes no sense to have wardriving equipment or expertise involved.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    > How much data do you think they "accidentally" sniffed and recorded? I'll bet precisely zero bytes, because they are moving goods I'll bet dollars to donuts they track exactly where their vehicles go, and penalize drivers that exceed a certain deviation from the expected route/timing. Either way seem like perfectly legal things to do.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Uhhh, which is completely unrelated to what Google was doing? And hey I never claimed it was illegal. I just claimed it was a likely rationale, that’s what OP was asking about. Google’s famous motto: “Don’t get us fined too much.”
      - foobarian 4y ago
        Right, also back to that original point: I could totally believe that a 2009 Google would run that project for other reasons than advertising, such as prestige or engineer-driven because they thought it was cool. I mean there are posts here from people who were part of the original project. Today a project like that would be beancounter-driven and only allowed if it had a clear short-term ROI. Did Street View have a positive ROI over time? I don't know. It certainly helped put Google Maps front and center. Maybe you can think of it as a very successful advertising campaign - instead of blowing millions on SuperBowl ads you blow millions on cars taking pictures of every public road mile.