If your premise is that Google is a big bad company, this is your case? I've always found this story to be excruciatingly disappointing. So, besides cameras an

If your premise is that Google is a big bad company, this is your case? I've always found this story to be excruciatingly disappointing. So, besides cameras and lasers, they also had a wifi sniffer on board that just captured all the data in the right frequency band. That is, after all, the whole point of this exercise: gather data and see what you can do with it later on. The case for doing this for WiFi is obviously that matching SSID to GPS locations and a little bit of triangulation through signal strength gives you a fast, precise enough location with a simple WiFi scan without having to wait for a one minute cold GPS fix. That you are not even going to get if indoors. The big problem here seems to be that they captured raw data instead of just running an actual wifi scan like your network card would. But if you've ever had to manually trigger one, you know that these take time, and then they only represent a single snapshot. So capturing raw data over the whole timespan solves both the timing problem and it allows you to get much better results given that you can now pretty exactly tell when a network comes out of reach. These things however require analysis that is easier done at some backend, not on the same machine occupied with freaking 3D lasers. And yes, it turns out, that if you were sending an email at the exact same time the google car was in reach of your network and that your network was unencrypted, they could possibly collect single isolated frames or fragments of your message. The reason we don't use WiFi for time critical stuff after all is of course that data corruption is very frequent and might require many turnarounds for one package to arrive in whole and correct. If you want to prove that Google is evil, find that 'Chiquita colombia killings' case. This one is just.. stupid.