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> ran with it without considering the fact that, in such data would probably be cleartext passwords. This part, I just don't buy. Maybe full-take captures was

> ran with it without considering the fact that, in such data would probably be cleartext passwords. This part, I just don't buy. Maybe full-take captures was the most expeditious at the time, but to me the notion that Google's engineers didn't know or didn't realize that they would end up doing a lot of "incidental collection" in the process is laughable.

scrollaway 12y ago
> This part, I just don't buy. And yet it's the one that Hanlon's razor explains very well. Goes to show that being terse in my original comment was the right move and you just can't wrap your head around the idea that, around the world, people do stuff without considering the consequences. The people in charge of your country, of your internet, of your health and your whole life, they're all humans and don't have weird superpowers, omniscience or anything like that. They make mistakes, and a lot of them are going to do stupid stuff. Consequences may vary.
- justcommenting 12y ago
  Not sure if you read the rest of my previous comment but Hanlon's razor is predicated on malice, so I still disagree. I never assumed assumed malice here. But it's still preposterous that a company with such skilled engineers wouldn't know until they were sued that they had been collecting large volumes of additional information over the span of years. That claim basically requires that this global mapping endeavour involving many people over multiple years was run by people who didn't understand the most basic aspects of wi-fi protocols but somehow flipped wireshark into monitor mode and then never looked at any raw captures anywhere to extract information from them, even while setting up collection systems used across the globe. Doing that once could be a mistake; even collecting all of the data could be a mistake; but not even realizing they had collected vastly more than beacon packets--probably over most of the planet--for multiple years? Hey...I guess anything is possible, but it doesn't pass the smell test for me.

scrollaway 12y ago

> This part, I just don't buy. And yet it's the one that Hanlon's razor explains very well. Goes to show that being terse in my original comment was the right move and you just can't wrap your head around the idea that, around the world, people do stuff without considering the consequences. The people in charge of your country, of your internet, of your health and your whole life, they're all humans and don't have weird superpowers, omniscience or anything like that. They make mistakes, and a lot of them are going to do stupid stuff. Consequences may vary.

justcommenting 12y ago
Not sure if you read the rest of my previous comment but Hanlon's razor is predicated on malice, so I still disagree. I never assumed assumed malice here. But it's still preposterous that a company with such skilled engineers wouldn't know until they were sued that they had been collecting large volumes of additional information over the span of years. That claim basically requires that this global mapping endeavour involving many people over multiple years was run by people who didn't understand the most basic aspects of wi-fi protocols but somehow flipped wireshark into monitor mode and then never looked at any raw captures anywhere to extract information from them, even while setting up collection systems used across the globe. Doing that once could be a mistake; even collecting all of the data could be a mistake; but not even realizing they had collected vastly more than beacon packets--probably over most of the planet--for multiple years? Hey...I guess anything is possible, but it doesn't pass the smell test for me.