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This had essentially nothing to do with web browsing packets, and everything to do with Google building a map of citizen bSSIDs and MAC addresses without their
by DANmode 2y ago
This had essentially nothing to do with web browsing packets, and everything to do with Google building a map of citizen bSSIDs and MAC addresses without their consent.
- gruez 2y agoMany of the same objections apply. What is google going to do with a point in time snapshot of "bSSIDs and MAC addresses"? The SSIDs don't tell them anything aside from "there's a wifi router at this vague location". MAC addresses are slightly more interesting, but there's nothing you can do with a point in time capture with them. Even if you want to do evil things like stalking people, you'd need to do regular scans, not the once-a-few-years drive-by they do with the streetview cars. Also to be clear I'm not claiming that it's fine for them to do it, or that they should continue doing it, only that the scare quotes around "accidentally" was unwarranted given the lack of evidence towards malice and lack of motive. To make an analogy, accidentally-exposed-to-the-public breaches happen all the time. You can complain about how there were lack of controls/security, but people don't typically don't use scare quotes to imply the breaches were somehow intentional.
- DANmode 2y agoDepending on the receiver's hardware, the information is far more dense and valuable than "vague location".
- gruez 2y agoYeah sure theoretically, but by all accounts they were using off the shelf wifi adapters, not using SDRs to make a quasi synthetic aperture radar to pinpoint the exact location of each transmitter. Moreover even if you had the exact position (eg. <1m) of each transmitter, it's unclear what they'd do with them.