Google offices raided by Korean police | Hacker News Reader

Google offices raided by Korean police

bbc.co.uk

56 pointsfiaz27 comments

It still puzzles me that people feel like their legal privacy was violated by the info gathering. The wifi was broadcasting, they were in public, they recorded some data. If this is illegal, I don't think it should be. Its analagous to taking pictures of people in public. Its in public. They're just standing there with an antenna.

Granted, it seems a bit creepy, and I don't fault people for feeling violated. But legal action seems silly. (I know that laws may be different in these various countries - I'm saying that this _shouldn't_ be illegal if it is)

Its analagous to taking pictures of people in public. Its in public . .. I know that laws may be different in these various countries - I'm saying that this _shouldn't_ be illegal if it is

Well, since you bring up the photography analogy ... average Koreans are a lot more sensitive than Americans to being randomly captured in others' photographs/videos, especially if those photos will later be published/broadcast in mass media. And Korean law backs them up on their desire for privacy, to certain extent (not as much as commonly believed, though).

One photographer's take on it, including translation of some of the relevant sections of Korean laws and various anecdotes of the troubles it's caused him in his work: http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2...

I don't understand why I was arrested for driving off with a new BMW that was parked in the street. It even came with a baby in the back! Lucky for me the keys were in the ignition and the door was open.

Stealing a car is not the same as recording a conversation.

Passively standing in the vicinity of a BMW doesn't let you drive it. Passively standing in a Wifi network space lets you transcribe the traffic. You don't change the system (in a loose sense) by recording the signals or not, while stealing the BMW, you do.

So I imagine a bunch of police rush into a google office… what exactly do they do? Do they jump on someone's desktop and start searching for evidence? Do they say "nobody touch nothin' ya hear?" and take over as sysadmin?

I mean they seized hard drives… Do they think that the data is on the hard drives laying around in the office?

This never makes sense to me.

Agreed, but I wonder what kind of red tape you would need to go through to raid a data center instead (if there did happen to be a data center in Korea)

> Do they jump on someone's desktop and start searching for evidence? Do they say "nobody touch nothin' ya hear?" and take over as sysadmin?

Do they use Google Desktop search or the local office's Google search appliance to search for the incriminating evidence?

If you've ever used Google's search appliance, you already know that wouldn't work.

Hilarious timing by Yonhap (S. Korea's public news agency) --- they reported this morning, just as the raid was about to begin: "Google ranked #1 as foreign company people want to work for" (in Korean): http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/economy/2010/08/10/0302000000AKR...

"According to the results of job portal JobsKorea's research on 814 university students on August 10, the foreign-invested company most desired to work for was Google, in first place with 23.1% of respondents. Afterwards were 9.0% for Yuhan Kimberly (a Kimberly-Clark JV), 5.3% for Citibank, 4.8% for IBM, and 3.2% for Sony."

As for this incident ... well, Internet privacy in Korea was always a crapshoot anyway, seeing as you have to send your citizen's id and real name to sign up for social networking sites, random forums, online shopping and games, or to verify your age so you can search for "breast cancer" or "genital warts" on Naver.

Not to minimise the very real concerns over what the hell Google is doing, but this raid smells of some ambitious young public prosecutors who want to make a name for themselves by taking on a big foreign company (and ignoring all the domestic companies whom I highly doubt have been entirely on the up-and-up about what they do with their 100% personally identifiable data about the members of their own sites). Incidentally, remember that last year, Google explicitly chose to disable Youtube comments and uploads from Korea rather than comply with the real name registration requirements ... http://www.pcworld.com/article/162989/google_disables_upload...

Google is facing the same accusations in Germany (they've been cleared in the UK) and in other countries, I think the raid may have to do with them stonewalling investigators like they did in Germany. After all, the Korean police can read the news just fine and they must have tried to get a feeling for how google would respond if they asked.

The not-so-smart element here is that I presume google learned a lot from their previous encounters with the law in Italy, France, the UK and Germany and would not have left any relevant data lying around their offices for investigators to find.

What bothers me about googles' behaviour in all this is that they behave as though they're above the law in terms of privacy and on top of that they had no business collecting this information in the first place.

Saying you're going to photograph the streets but actually adding a wardriving module to your data collection vehicles is not something that you can claim you did 'accidentally'.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0515/google-streetview-vans-acci...

I find that extremely hard to believe and I think google has some public explaining to do about how such a thing could ever happen 'by accident'.

If I were spending millions of dollars sending cars + drivers out on every street in the world I would want to collect as much data as possible. I imagine they had cell radios, wifi radios, probably even FM and AM radios all collecting data in conjunction with highly-accurate GPS readings.

If their software to collect WiFi signal strength was based on a packet capture system (perhaps by interfacing with Wireshark or one of its libraries), I could see how it might be a mistake to save this data while attempting to collect other data.

However, I imagine that they simply wanted to collect as much data as possible, including WiFi traffic (that should really be considered public, anyway...).

If I were going on holiday or on business to a city, it would be incredibly useful if I could see a public/free wifi overlay (showing the radius of a decent strength signal) on top of the city map. The only way to do that of course would be to scan and record all available wifi networks at every step and then group the signals based on the ssid. That will obviously hit all networks, but if it cant access anything what is the problem?

If the ssid is visible and your network is available then everyone with a wifi card is doing what Google did every time they turn their laptop or smartphone on anyway.

It's one thing to record the signatures of open wireless networks in a given location. But, from what I hear, Google was also recording the payloads of the packets it intercepted. I can understand people being upset by this, especially if carried out on a large scale.

Privacy laws are applicable to companies storing data, not on individuals that incidentally use someone's open network.

Also, they weren't just scanning for availability and signal strength, they were snooping the traffic and saving it.

> If the ssid is visible and your network is available then everyone with a wifi card is doing what Google did every time they turn their laptop or smartphone on anyway.

That's not true. Unless the card is in promiscuous mode, packets intended for other machines will be discarded. Even if other cards were in promiscuous mode, they'd still have to intentionally save the packets to approach what Google did.

Hey, nobody is arguing they shouldn't try to save some dollars... just that if they were going to gather more data than originally planned, they could have told us.

Moreover, if it was just economic sense, and hence it was done on purpose, then it would have been nice if they hadn't lied when prosecutors asked them.

I don't think it's that much to ask.

The way I understood the controversy they were trying to build a DB to help geolocation by mapping SSIDs / MAC addresses to GPS coordinates. Depending on how that's implemented, I can see it logging more or less data (perhaps depending on diagnostics flags) as it trundles by.

Frankly, I'm not in the least bit concerned by the allegations by Google here.

nope. They were logging network traffic on every unprotected wifi signal.. Sure they would only have fragments -- but it was a screwup on googles behalf.

Well if you're looking for MACs, wouldn't you need to listen in on network traffic? And then it comes down to whether that listened traffic was recorded or not, which is exactly what I'd expect to see from a diagnostic switch.

I don't know why you are being downvoted so I upped you.

Off-Topic

There is a bad tendency that people just downvote when they hear something they don't like or disagree with. I hope this will pass, this is not reddit!

I think they just wanted to see in general what google is doing and this was as good an excuse as any.

This sounds like a me too by the korean police. I mean, what's the point, most of that data won't be held on korean servers, much less google's korean office.

I'd like to know if google employees even use their desktop as thick or thin clients.

Well its on BBC news. I am sure it adds pressure on Google and probably sends them a clear signal.

A clear signal to do what, be less transparent and pull their office out of Korea?

(Remember, Korea has no great firewall. Google can profit from Korean users without having an office there.)

To be more careful with privacy.

I am sure Google would not want to be prevented to provide a service - personally I think a great service - of viewing the streets of Korea.

No, the message they are sending is that, when you confess to a mistake and say that you're going to fix it, everyone starts attacking you. Keep in mind that Google announced that they made a mistake by storing packets from wifi networks; it wasn't leaked by an employee who thought it was unethical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com