Google accused of criminal intent over StreetView data | Hacker News Reader

Google accused of criminal intent over StreetView data

news.bbc.co.uk

10 pointsdraegtun12 comments

I wonder if we'll always have to deal with a world of nubs, or if some day everyone will just "get it." It just blows my mind how little these people seem to grasp about tech-related issues. Especially when privacy is concerned.

That's what I've been wondering for a while. I've cringed my whole life when people say "I'm not good with computers..." or display fundamental misunderstandings. However, that made more sense when the average person didn't use a computer as part of daily life. Now that they do, I thought this would subside... instead, it's gotten worse, and we have legislators who are barely at the "You've Got Mail" stage making critically important decisions about the internet, software patents, and so on. Every day I deal with people who have businesses based on the internet, but don't understand what an IP address, a pixel, or a server is.

Here in Australia our communications minister has gone on the offensive against Google (widely presumed to be in retaliation for their opposition to his proposed internet filter), most recently claiming that they could have been stealing people's banking details...

(I'm honestly not sure if he's clueless or just deliberately fear-mongering)

> "The idea that this was a work of a lone engineer doesn't add up. This is complex code and it must have been given a budget and been overseen. <snip>" said Mr Davies.

Careful. If the code you write is complex, make sure it is also written by more than just a lone you, that is has a budget and is overseen by someone.

What a load of crap.

You summed up in five words, what I was planning on writing quite a few more on. Well done. :)

This seems like a clear-cut instance of Hanlon's Razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

It's weird but HN removes the apostrophe from the URL unless you encode it.

Apostrophe injection attacks are very bad in Scheme.

Simpler would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_Razor

If you happen to know which pages redirect to the page you want?

Privacy International sound like obtuse blowhards in this piece.

Once you're promiscuously logging unencrypted wifi traffic, it's harder to throw away the possibly-sensitive parts of 'payload data' than to just store it all for later. Storing indiscriminately may be careless, but it is easier to code. Also, store-it-all and analyze/carve/blind-it-later is far more in keeping with MapReduce/BigTable/etc data-mining ethos of a place like Google. So Google's explanation is more credible than Privacy International's speculation.

This doesn't absolve Google -- and the engineer(s) who wrote and deployed the code in question -- from all responsibility. An alarm should have gone off in someone's head -- "collecting this data is problematic!" But it's plausible one person wrote the best scanner they could, and then later another wrote the most comprehensive storage layer they could, and either no one understood the combined impact, or the only person(s) who did were especially obtuse/cavalier about privacy issues. (Lots of niches in the new economy reward, rather than punish, a blaise attitude about privacy details -- at least until it reaches the level of public scandal.)

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