7 ms·

Google Engineer Told Others of Data Collection

108 points by NaOH 15y ago

bo1024 15y ago
This whole story takes on an interesting flavor given the recent passage of CISPA by the House....
driverdan 15y ago
My reaction: meh. Any data you transmit over an unencrypted WiFi connection is available for anyone to gather so long as it's done passively. I can understand the concerns of a major data company like Google having access to this information but the solution is quite simple. Stop using unencrypted WiFi!
- smokeyj 15y ago
  I feel like this is a matter of trust and credibility more than anything.
- chris_wot 15y ago
  That's a bit like saying that because you forget to lock your front door anyone is allowed to walk into your house and read all your confidential documents.
  - Klinky 15y ago
    It's more like yelling out your window "My house is unlocked, my house is unlocked" and getting upset that someone going down the street recorded you saying this.
    - DanBC 15y ago
      Possibly criminal offence in the UK. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4721723.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4721723.stm)
      - Klinky 15y ago
        I do believe that Google passively collected data, rather than actively hijacked wifi networks.
        ktizo 15y ago
        I personally think that Google is aiming for non-geographical statelike entity status. And as such can self justify a hell of a lot to achieve this.
        Create 15y ago
        They tried to hide in CH, saying that the personal data they hold is of similar nature to banks'. They failed at their attempts, but there are a lot of "cloud" people still pushing at this angle, even as the UBS/CS events went the opposite direction.
  - raldi 15y ago
    More like, you were reading your diary aloud with a megaphone, and then got upset because your neighbor overheard a bit.
    - chris_wot 15y ago
      Not really. More like you are writing your diary in your room and someone with binoculaurs hiding in the tree outside your window reads what you've written.
      - Locke1689 15y ago
        No it isn't. Your analogy implies targeting, but that's not at all what happens in this situation. Simply recording all data flowing through an area is like walking down a street with a tape recorder and recording someone yelling their password out of their window.
        FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
        Your analogy implies the user being aware of what they're broadcasting (in the act of shouting).
        chris_wot 15y ago
        And hence, all analogies have limits :-)
        lurker14 15y ago
        Analogies to infinity don't.
        chris_wot 15y ago
        Nice math joke.
- k-mcgrady 15y ago
  This is not a shot at you but your comment sums up the 'privacy problem' in the tech industry right now. Normal users don't understand even basic things (like securing a wireless network, letting an app access their contacts etc.) and tech companies are taking advantage of it. Most normal users get people to set up their wireless networks. They really don't have a clue. Tech companies need to be aware of this when designing systems and drop the attitude that it's the users fault/they should know better.
  - rickmb 15y ago
    This is not a shot at you but your comment sums up the 'privacy problem' in the tech industry right now. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Whether or not normal users understand these things isn't relevant. The fact is that in countries with strong privacy protection (like most of Europe), collecting such data is illegal regardless. It's the act of collecting the data that is considered invasive. Compare this to the real world: we do a lot of things in public, but it would be really invasive if Google employees would start following us around, recording our public movements and conversations. We shouldn't have to live our lives in secret and "encrypt" everything we do in order to have some privacy. The bottom line: it's not the part of the tech industry that provides "insecure" services that is at fault, it's the part of the tech industry that feels it has the right to abuse the information "because it is there". We should stop accepting the widespread notion in the industry that crime is a valid business strategy until you get caught.
    - k-mcgrady 15y ago
      I agree with you completely (I don't think I made my point clearly). I don't think it would be fine to breach privacy if we educated users properly. What I was getting at is that many people in tech seem to think that is the problem. That people don't understand how their data is being used and what to do if they don't want to allow access to it, when the companies shouldn't be anywhere near the data in the first place. You sum it up well: >>"The bottom line: it's not the part of the tech industry that provides "insecure" services that is at fault, it's the part of the tech industry that feels it has the right to abuse the information "because it is there"."
- loverobots 15y ago
  Thief opens your door and my reaction will be: meh. Use better locks or at least lock it ;)
  - RandallBrown 15y ago
    So you're saying it's legal that the thief stole stuff because their lock was insufficient? That makes ALL stealing legal...
kruipen 15y ago
Bad PR aside, what does the law say? Is it legal to record traffic from unencrypted WiFi networks?
- stephengillie 15y ago
  It IS legal to film a movie played at a drive-in theater if you can see it from your house. If your neighbor leaves an opened piece of mail by a window, are you allowed to read it?
  - lotu 15y ago
    Yes it is legal to film a movie in general though unless the movie is in the public domain you would be committing copyright infringement by distributing it. This is a separate issue from privacy.
- chris_wot 15y ago
  Don't know abou the U.S., but in Australia they were found to have breached privacy legislation. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/google-australia-breached-privacy-act-but-apology-is-sufficient/story-e6frgakx-1225889876666 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/google-austral...
- eternalban 15y ago
  Wrong question. Is it ethical for a company that already has massive amounts of information on your every move on the net to extend that reach by peeping into your house as well? And then their CEO has the chutzpa to blurb on his g+ about "privacy" concerns.
  - tensor 15y ago
    The funny thing about all this is that (perhaps this case aside) Google is getting a lot of bad PR because they actually tell people what they do. Meanwhile, everyone uses airmiles cards, facebook, and numerous other services that abuse privacy and bury the details in fine print. Nobody gets upset. Did you know that by using an airmiles card all your transactions are sent off for data mining? Did you know that Target used transaction data to predict that teenage girl was pregnant before she even told her parents and sent baby related print ads to her house? Your privacy is being violated all the time, constantly, and nobody tells you about it. If you care so much about the ethics of recording traffic from open wifi networks, then I hope you also pick up your sword against the massive tide of less obvious and more directly nefarious privacy violations.
rachelbythebay 15y ago
Fate, destiny, or in this case, Kismet. How did it go from "rogue code" to "rogue engineer", anyway?
23david 15y ago
I'm surprised that the google engineers and managers involved in the project were so stupid/arrogant/lazy that they deployed a program that seemed to just vacuum up payload data for later analysis instead of processing and sanitizing the data as it was collected. Maybe google needs to tweak their HR algorithms to focus on hiring people with a bit more common sense. It's nice to have a powerful legal department that can help get your engineers and company out of trouble when they really screw up, but it's still a PR disaster... Google has a big problem now that on a corporate level they seem unable to do the right thing when they have clearly screwed up. Just come clean about what really happened, sincerely apologize, and then take serious steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again.
- eternalban 15y ago
  Why does "street view" need to "collect data", much less sanitize it? How could this possibly be a error of judgment? Take pictures, fine. Snoop on people's WIFI? What possible purpose could that serve in context of Google Maps? > Just come clean about what really happened, sincerely apologize, and then take serious steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again. I do not understand this attitude. They were spying on people. It is that simple.
  - wetherbeei 15y ago
    Ever heard of Skyhook [1]? Not that I know what it was used for, but generating statistics on the types/coverage of wireless networks could prove useful in the future. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
  - tjoff 15y ago
    Because they want to triangulate all the wifi access points. This helps you to fast and with low power determine your position using wifi on your android phone. This is valuable data and I think both google and apple used a third party for this before but have since build up their own database of wifi networks. The payload is used to help and triangulate the accesspoints more precisely (according to the article).
magicalist 15y ago
still reading the actual report, but this is always an interesting topic whenever this story is being written about: > Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. put another way, Google refused to provide information it had collected about people without a warrant, which is probably the correct behavior. On the other hand, how can you have oversight without seeing what was actually collected? If google is operating in Germany (I assume so), they'd have to obey a court order, so did german authorities see the actual data? Maybe the FCC didn't have that power, but it would be nice if the nytimes at least provided some depth there. Otherwise they're giving the equivalent of "'I didn't murder him' is exactly what a murderer would say!" edit: to answer my own question, the report mentions that the FCC didn't pursue access to the data after the refusal because bodies in France, Canada, and the Netherlands did view it and issued reports.
tmuir 15y ago
In FY 2011, Google reported earnings of $37,905,000,000. So as punishment for obstructing a government investigation, they were fined $25,000, which is the equivalent of less than 20 seconds of revenue. That'll show them.
- k-mcgrady 15y ago
  There might be a limit set on how much a company can be fined. The $25,000 is almost just a way of letting the public know they are guilty and for a company that requires so much trust regarding privacy from users the bad publicity is far more costly.
  - magicalist 15y ago
    As mentioned in the report, that's the maximum that the FCC can levy on a licensee that fails to adequately answer a (not enforced by subpoena) Letter of Inquiry ("failure to respond to Commission communications"). In paragraph 49 they mention that they may start applying much larger fees to companies with that kind of revenue to discourage thinking of that kind of fee "as a cost of doing business".
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
gwillen 15y ago
> When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.” > “That never occurred,” the report says. From what I remember, it's very plausible to me that the "to do" item was actually just part of the design doc template, and they just never edited that part of the template. Which is not to say they shouldn't have had a review, but they may not have actually affirmatively set themselves the goal of having one and then failed, as the article suggests.
balajiviswanath 15y ago
If an ordinary Joe had tried to open your unlocked mailbox to read the mails he would be arrested. But if a $150b corporation does this, it would be wrapped in wrist. Only Google can get away so easily from this. Imagine if Microsoft had done this.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  Or, well, the NSA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database
- Natsu 15y ago
  What makes you think that people aren't listening to random, unencrypted wireless transmissions and not getting caught?
theunixbeard 15y ago
Is anyone else wondering how they apparently got 'full text of emails' just by briefly monitoring open WiFi networks as they drove by??? What email isn't on HTTPS these days?
- wmf 15y ago
  SMTP and POP?
1a2b3c 15y ago
I have over 4,000 email, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks. -- Your Hero, Mark Zuckergberg First programming book: C++ For Dummies Tweak the HR algorithm. Indeed. Money trumps ethics. And Google has lots of money. [Cue Simon and Garfunkel] "... feel-in' Goog-ley..."
1a2b3c 15y ago
Probability that Google managers would lie is non-zero.
ajays 15y ago
Had an individual person done this, the law would have been on him quicker than lightning[1]. But when a company does it, it gets off with a trivial fine. [1]: http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/04/State/Wi_Fi_cloaks_a_new_br.shtml http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/04/State/Wi_Fi_cloaks_a_new_b...
- its_so_on 15y ago
  To be fair, a company wouldn't stalk and kill me, whereas an individual person 'just might'. Don't read too much into this comment...just saying I'm not surprised if the law comes down quick as lightning on an individual person who is doing such creepy stuff, whereas companies can...
  - flexd 15y ago
    A person from that company could stalk and kill you?
    - goblin89 15y ago
      IANAL but a company is probably required to guard the data internally, and an employee who's alleged of being somehow related to usage of that data for actions described would likely be a very serious problem for the whole organization. It's also reasonable to expect from an employee at a serious company to value their position and not to be crazy. This is what makes me think of a company as less likely to attack me in this particular way than an outside individual, but I may be wrong.
      - lawnchair_larry 15y ago
        This comment is amusing because network admins at google have been in trouble for abusing their access to harass and stalk underage girls. http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-first-spying-engineer http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-firs...
  - orbitingpluto 15y ago
nl 15y ago
The engineer used existing software that happened to grab and then keep all traffic instead of only the bit that they needed. They discussed it internally and decided to fix it... sometime. Yes, they should have thought it through more, and not fixing it was lazy and thoughtless, but at the same time.... If you haven't done something similar then you aren't doing enough.
Create 15y ago
Although the link below makes fun of it, back in those days, it was a literally a question of life and death – there was vengeance and most serious sentences. Definitely not an urban legend from historical point of view (irrespective of other technical tools available at the time and related speculation). http://www.funzine.hu/2012-03-urban-legends-the-whale-of-the-cia/ http://www.funzine.hu/2012-03-urban-legends-the-whale-of-the... The trailer had to do with rocket movements.
- Create 15y ago
  for the downvoter: obviously you never had a girl who's life was ruined because her parents were sentenced in such a case.
hubbit 15y ago
Google should just become an access provider. As an ISP they would have authority to go over each and every packet with as fine a comb as they can muster. In the interests of "regulatory compliance" and "providing better service" of course. It's disturbing to see some commenters making arguments that essentially amount to "but everyone else has always done it or is now doing it". When you are Google you can pretty much do as you please. That includes taking the high road and ignoring foolish critics. Or taking the low road. And ignoring foolish(?) critics. Ethics is a choice not an obligation.

108 points by NaOH 15y ago

This whole story takes on an interesting flavor given the recent passage of CISPA by the House....

My reaction: meh. Any data you transmit over an unencrypted WiFi connection is available for anyone to gather so long as it's done passively. I can understand the concerns of a major data company like Google having access to this information but the solution is quite simple. Stop using unencrypted WiFi!

smokeyj 15y ago
I feel like this is a matter of trust and credibility more than anything.
chris_wot 15y ago
That's a bit like saying that because you forget to lock your front door anyone is allowed to walk into your house and read all your confidential documents.
- Klinky 15y ago
  It's more like yelling out your window "My house is unlocked, my house is unlocked" and getting upset that someone going down the street recorded you saying this.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    Possibly criminal offence in the UK. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4721723.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4721723.stm)
    - Klinky 15y ago
      I do believe that Google passively collected data, rather than actively hijacked wifi networks.
      - ktizo 15y ago
        I personally think that Google is aiming for non-geographical statelike entity status. And as such can self justify a hell of a lot to achieve this.
        Create 15y ago
        They tried to hide in CH, saying that the personal data they hold is of similar nature to banks'. They failed at their attempts, but there are a lot of "cloud" people still pushing at this angle, even as the UBS/CS events went the opposite direction.
- raldi 15y ago
  More like, you were reading your diary aloud with a megaphone, and then got upset because your neighbor overheard a bit.
  - chris_wot 15y ago
    Not really. More like you are writing your diary in your room and someone with binoculaurs hiding in the tree outside your window reads what you've written.
    - Locke1689 15y ago
      No it isn't. Your analogy implies targeting, but that's not at all what happens in this situation. Simply recording all data flowing through an area is like walking down a street with a tape recorder and recording someone yelling their password out of their window.
      - FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
        Your analogy implies the user being aware of what they're broadcasting (in the act of shouting).
        chris_wot 15y ago
        And hence, all analogies have limits :-)
        lurker14 15y ago
        Analogies to infinity don't.
        chris_wot 15y ago
        Nice math joke.
k-mcgrady 15y ago
This is not a shot at you but your comment sums up the 'privacy problem' in the tech industry right now. Normal users don't understand even basic things (like securing a wireless network, letting an app access their contacts etc.) and tech companies are taking advantage of it. Most normal users get people to set up their wireless networks. They really don't have a clue. Tech companies need to be aware of this when designing systems and drop the attitude that it's the users fault/they should know better.
- rickmb 15y ago
  This is not a shot at you but your comment sums up the 'privacy problem' in the tech industry right now. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Whether or not normal users understand these things isn't relevant. The fact is that in countries with strong privacy protection (like most of Europe), collecting such data is illegal regardless. It's the act of collecting the data that is considered invasive. Compare this to the real world: we do a lot of things in public, but it would be really invasive if Google employees would start following us around, recording our public movements and conversations. We shouldn't have to live our lives in secret and "encrypt" everything we do in order to have some privacy. The bottom line: it's not the part of the tech industry that provides "insecure" services that is at fault, it's the part of the tech industry that feels it has the right to abuse the information "because it is there". We should stop accepting the widespread notion in the industry that crime is a valid business strategy until you get caught.
  - k-mcgrady 15y ago
    I agree with you completely (I don't think I made my point clearly). I don't think it would be fine to breach privacy if we educated users properly. What I was getting at is that many people in tech seem to think that is the problem. That people don't understand how their data is being used and what to do if they don't want to allow access to it, when the companies shouldn't be anywhere near the data in the first place. You sum it up well: >>"The bottom line: it's not the part of the tech industry that provides "insecure" services that is at fault, it's the part of the tech industry that feels it has the right to abuse the information "because it is there"."
loverobots 15y ago
Thief opens your door and my reaction will be: meh. Use better locks or at least lock it ;)
- RandallBrown 15y ago
  So you're saying it's legal that the thief stole stuff because their lock was insufficient? That makes ALL stealing legal...

kruipen 15y ago

Bad PR aside, what does the law say? Is it legal to record traffic from unencrypted WiFi networks?

stephengillie 15y ago
It IS legal to film a movie played at a drive-in theater if you can see it from your house. If your neighbor leaves an opened piece of mail by a window, are you allowed to read it?
- lotu 15y ago
  Yes it is legal to film a movie in general though unless the movie is in the public domain you would be committing copyright infringement by distributing it. This is a separate issue from privacy.
chris_wot 15y ago
Don't know abou the U.S., but in Australia they were found to have breached privacy legislation. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/google-australia-breached-privacy-act-but-apology-is-sufficient/story-e6frgakx-1225889876666 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/google-austral...
eternalban 15y ago
Wrong question. Is it ethical for a company that already has massive amounts of information on your every move on the net to extend that reach by peeping into your house as well? And then their CEO has the chutzpa to blurb on his g+ about "privacy" concerns.
- tensor 15y ago
  The funny thing about all this is that (perhaps this case aside) Google is getting a lot of bad PR because they actually tell people what they do. Meanwhile, everyone uses airmiles cards, facebook, and numerous other services that abuse privacy and bury the details in fine print. Nobody gets upset. Did you know that by using an airmiles card all your transactions are sent off for data mining? Did you know that Target used transaction data to predict that teenage girl was pregnant before she even told her parents and sent baby related print ads to her house? Your privacy is being violated all the time, constantly, and nobody tells you about it. If you care so much about the ethics of recording traffic from open wifi networks, then I hope you also pick up your sword against the massive tide of less obvious and more directly nefarious privacy violations.

rachelbythebay 15y ago

Fate, destiny, or in this case, Kismet. How did it go from "rogue code" to "rogue engineer", anyway?

23david 15y ago

I'm surprised that the google engineers and managers involved in the project were so stupid/arrogant/lazy that they deployed a program that seemed to just vacuum up payload data for later analysis instead of processing and sanitizing the data as it was collected. Maybe google needs to tweak their HR algorithms to focus on hiring people with a bit more common sense. It's nice to have a powerful legal department that can help get your engineers and company out of trouble when they really screw up, but it's still a PR disaster... Google has a big problem now that on a corporate level they seem unable to do the right thing when they have clearly screwed up. Just come clean about what really happened, sincerely apologize, and then take serious steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

eternalban 15y ago
Why does "street view" need to "collect data", much less sanitize it? How could this possibly be a error of judgment? Take pictures, fine. Snoop on people's WIFI? What possible purpose could that serve in context of Google Maps? > Just come clean about what really happened, sincerely apologize, and then take serious steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again. I do not understand this attitude. They were spying on people. It is that simple.
- wetherbeei 15y ago
  Ever heard of Skyhook [1]? Not that I know what it was used for, but generating statistics on the types/coverage of wireless networks could prove useful in the future. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
- tjoff 15y ago
  Because they want to triangulate all the wifi access points. This helps you to fast and with low power determine your position using wifi on your android phone. This is valuable data and I think both google and apple used a third party for this before but have since build up their own database of wifi networks. The payload is used to help and triangulate the accesspoints more precisely (according to the article).

magicalist 15y ago

still reading the actual report, but this is always an interesting topic whenever this story is being written about: > Google says the data collection was legal. But when regulators asked to see what had been collected, Google refused, the report says, saying it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material. put another way, Google refused to provide information it had collected about people without a warrant, which is probably the correct behavior. On the other hand, how can you have oversight without seeing what was actually collected? If google is operating in Germany (I assume so), they'd have to obey a court order, so did german authorities see the actual data? Maybe the FCC didn't have that power, but it would be nice if the nytimes at least provided some depth there. Otherwise they're giving the equivalent of "'I didn't murder him' is exactly what a murderer would say!" edit: to answer my own question, the report mentions that the FCC didn't pursue access to the data after the refusal because bodies in France, Canada, and the Netherlands did view it and issued reports.

tmuir 15y ago

In FY 2011, Google reported earnings of $37,905,000,000. So as punishment for obstructing a government investigation, they were fined $25,000, which is the equivalent of less than 20 seconds of revenue. That'll show them.

k-mcgrady 15y ago
There might be a limit set on how much a company can be fined. The $25,000 is almost just a way of letting the public know they are guilty and for a company that requires so much trust regarding privacy from users the bad publicity is far more costly.
- magicalist 15y ago
  As mentioned in the report, that's the maximum that the FCC can levy on a licensee that fails to adequately answer a (not enforced by subpoena) Letter of Inquiry ("failure to respond to Commission communications"). In paragraph 49 they mention that they may start applying much larger fees to companies with that kind of revenue to discourage thinking of that kind of fee "as a cost of doing business".

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

gwillen 15y ago

> When the program was being designed, the report says, it included the following “to do” item: “Discuss privacy considerations with Product Counsel.” > “That never occurred,” the report says. From what I remember, it's very plausible to me that the "to do" item was actually just part of the design doc template, and they just never edited that part of the template. Which is not to say they shouldn't have had a review, but they may not have actually affirmatively set themselves the goal of having one and then failed, as the article suggests.

balajiviswanath 15y ago

If an ordinary Joe had tried to open your unlocked mailbox to read the mails he would be arrested. But if a $150b corporation does this, it would be wrapped in wrist. Only Google can get away so easily from this. Imagine if Microsoft had done this.

nostrademons 15y ago
Or, well, the NSA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database
Natsu 15y ago
What makes you think that people aren't listening to random, unencrypted wireless transmissions and not getting caught?

theunixbeard 15y ago

Is anyone else wondering how they apparently got 'full text of emails' just by briefly monitoring open WiFi networks as they drove by??? What email isn't on HTTPS these days?

wmf 15y ago
SMTP and POP?

1a2b3c 15y ago

I have over 4,000 email, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks. -- Your Hero, Mark Zuckergberg First programming book: C++ For Dummies Tweak the HR algorithm. Indeed. Money trumps ethics. And Google has lots of money. [Cue Simon and Garfunkel] "... feel-in' Goog-ley..."

1a2b3c 15y ago

Probability that Google managers would lie is non-zero.

ajays 15y ago

Had an individual person done this, the law would have been on him quicker than lightning[1]. But when a company does it, it gets off with a trivial fine. [1]: http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/04/State/Wi_Fi_cloaks_a_new_br.shtml http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/04/State/Wi_Fi_cloaks_a_new_b...

its_so_on 15y ago
To be fair, a company wouldn't stalk and kill me, whereas an individual person 'just might'. Don't read too much into this comment...just saying I'm not surprised if the law comes down quick as lightning on an individual person who is doing such creepy stuff, whereas companies can...
- flexd 15y ago
  A person from that company could stalk and kill you?
  - goblin89 15y ago
    IANAL but a company is probably required to guard the data internally, and an employee who's alleged of being somehow related to usage of that data for actions described would likely be a very serious problem for the whole organization. It's also reasonable to expect from an employee at a serious company to value their position and not to be crazy. This is what makes me think of a company as less likely to attack me in this particular way than an outside individual, but I may be wrong.
    - lawnchair_larry 15y ago
      This comment is amusing because network admins at google have been in trouble for abusing their access to harass and stalk underage girls. http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-first-spying-engineer http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-firs...
- orbitingpluto 15y ago

nl 15y ago

The engineer used existing software that happened to grab and then keep all traffic instead of only the bit that they needed. They discussed it internally and decided to fix it... sometime. Yes, they should have thought it through more, and not fixing it was lazy and thoughtless, but at the same time.... If you haven't done something similar then you aren't doing enough.

Create 15y ago

Although the link below makes fun of it, back in those days, it was a literally a question of life and death – there was vengeance and most serious sentences. Definitely not an urban legend from historical point of view (irrespective of other technical tools available at the time and related speculation). http://www.funzine.hu/2012-03-urban-legends-the-whale-of-the-cia/ http://www.funzine.hu/2012-03-urban-legends-the-whale-of-the... The trailer had to do with rocket movements.

Create 15y ago
for the downvoter: obviously you never had a girl who's life was ruined because her parents were sentenced in such a case.

hubbit 15y ago

Google should just become an access provider. As an ISP they would have authority to go over each and every packet with as fine a comb as they can muster. In the interests of "regulatory compliance" and "providing better service" of course. It's disturbing to see some commenters making arguments that essentially amount to "but everyone else has always done it or is now doing it". When you are Google you can pretty much do as you please. That includes taking the high road and ignoring foolish critics. Or taking the low road. And ignoring foolish(?) critics. Ethics is a choice not an obligation.