SourCe:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/google-wifi-sniffing/
I'll write a summary soon |
I think lawers can't tell the difference between a wifi packet and the (possibly personnel) data it contains. |
Quoting the article:
"Lawyers suing Google claimed Thursday they have discovered evidence in a patent application that Google deliberately programmed its Street View cars to collect private data from open Wi-Fi networks, despite claims to the contrary."
Google has stated that collection was done mistakenly because of a coding error.
Background:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-05-15-n73.html |
"Lawyers suing Google" – so what else is new? |
I haven't read too much into it, but i wouldn't be surprised if Google was doing this on purpose. |
And
'Google to hand over intercepted data':
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db664044-6f43-11df-9f43-00144feabdc0.html |
"“We screwed up."
- Eric Schmidt |
Also
'Google wants to patent technology used to 'snoop' Wi-Fi networks':
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177634/Google_wants_to_patent_technology_used_to_snoop_Wi_Fi_networks |
A detailed report that shows information about Google's software:
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//googleblogs/pdfs/friedberg_sourcecode_analysis_060910.pdf
"Gslite is an executable program that captures, parses, and writes to disk 802.11 wireless frame data. In particular, it parses all frame header data and associates it with its GPS coordinates for easy storage and use in mapping network locations. The program does not analyze or parse the body of Data frames, which contain user content. The data in the Data frame body passes through memory and is written to disk in unparsed format if the frame is sent over an unencrypted wireless network, and is discarded if the frame is sent over an encrypted network." |
Did you see that the body of the frames are stored only because a constant is set to true? |
