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I have a hard time believing that Google deliberately set out to capture wifi payloads. Apart from the obvious illegality, what use would they possibly have for

I have a hard time believing that Google deliberately set out to capture wifi payloads. Apart from the obvious illegality, what use would they possibly have for such data? Google already knows an immense amount of detail about its users. They screwed up (twice, if you count failing to delete the data) and thats a serious matter. But deliberately wardriving entire countries? Hard to believe.

mattzito 12y ago
I think there's a middle ground here - first off, is it that obviously illegal? Is there an expectation of privacy, similar to eavesdropping on a conversation at the table next to you? I think it is now, but if we go back to 2007/2008, it might not have been. And it might not even have been malicious - the Google engineers doing it might have said, "Hey look, if x amount of wifi data is good, X amount has got to be even better!". After all, they're data junkies, and might have decided to capture chunks of data wholesale with the best intentions (and maybe not even any clear ideas of how to use it). I'm not trying to justify their actions, just trying to posit a scenario where Google did intentionally capture wifi payloads without requiring that they had a malicious purpose to do so.