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Comment by retube | Hacker News Reader

"Google blamed the collection on a rogue bit of code that was never removed after it had been inserted by an engineer during testing"

I've seen this quoted before. If it's accurate it's pretty damn weak, in fact totally unbelievable. There's absolutely no way this data could have been collected unless deliberately.

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Why? Their goal was to collect MAC adresses of all the WiFi hotspots they encountered. If you want to do that you have to – at least temporarily – save all packets that are coming in. The code to do this already exists, Google probably repurposed something. Deleting all the packets you received is a additional step, it’s not guaranteed that whatever they used automatically deletes all received packets as soon as they are no longer needed. Someone has to think of that and fix it.

They are collecting gigabytes of data, so those additional packets wouldn’t exactly be obvious. And they probably just copied the HDDs those cars have wholesale, without any prior processing of the data.

yes but isn't it the MAC addresses they collected "by accident"? That's my point (or have I totally misunderstood this?)

They wanted to collect MAC addresses. There is, of course, also the question whether they can do that without asking, but that was their intention.

> If you want to do that you have to – at least temporarily – save all packets that are coming in.

So, maybe something like:

  1) Capture incoming packet
  2) Store its MAC address
  3) Discard packet data
  4) Repeat

This turned out to be difficult for Google's programmers?

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