Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by atatatat | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

atatatat

Are you aware of these Googley actions?

1) people's location data they weren't aware was being kept (dozens of stories and nuances now),

2) scraped SSIDs of WiFi routers from...the world...via Street View cars, said "Whoopsie"

3) collected MAC addresses via free terminals and hotspots in...NYC was it?

4) Allowed multiple cross-storage access bugs where users have accessed each others' shit in Drive....

Anyway, I fear you are not an authority on Google's effectiveness at preserving customer privacy.

View on HN

I'm not claiming to be an authority, I'm just commenting on my experience.

> 1) people's location data they weren't aware was being kept (dozens of stories and nuances now),

Location history is currently off by default.

> 2) scraped SSIDs of WiFi routers from...the world...via Street View cars, said "Whoopsie"

I am quite sure this was an honest mistake.

> 3) collected MAC addresses via free terminals and hotspots in...NYC was it?

Not sure what this is about.

> 4) Allowed multiple cross-storage access bugs where users have accessed each others' shit in Drive...

Again, I don't remember this story, and anyway, bugs happen.

> and anyway, bugs happen.

This is an extraordinarily blasé who-gives-a-shit response to a critical security vulnerability. Hopefully your attitude isn’t representative of your employer. Maintaining the privacy of the data customers entrust to you should be your highest priority.

I'm sorry, but a publicly traded company's highest priority is to it's shareholder. To them money is the only priority.

To think otherwise is a bit naive.

User privacy is usually an afterthought, or a PR statement. Since you are the product being sold, your expectation of privacy should be somewhat lower.

For working at Google you seem to know very little about them.

1. Data was sent even though location history was turned off. [1]

2. It is pretty well-known that SSIDs can be used by location services to increase location accuracy, especially where GPS coverage is low or noisy [2], or slow to connect.

3. Would be useful for location tracking again.

4. That seems like a bug that wouldn't really benefit Google at all.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/north-america-science-technology-...

[2]: https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/how-google-uses-wi-fi-n...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com