How could this possibly be a error of judgment? Take pictures, fine. Snoop on people's WIFI? What possible purpose could that serve in context of Google Maps?
> Just come clean about what really happened, sincerely apologize, and then take serious steps to ensure that it doesn't happen again.
I do not understand this attitude. They were spying on people. It is that simple.
The payload is used to help and triangulate the accesspoints more precisely (according to the article).
Because they were in a pretty bad position once they found out what was happening? I can see an "Oh sh-, we broke the law" moment happening at the highest levels of the organization.
At least one person at Google thought it could be potentially useful:
> The report, quoting the engineer’s original proposal, gives a somewhat different impression. The data, the engineer wrote, would “be analyzed offline for use in other initiatives.” Google says this was never done.
I think Google is guilty of arrogance wrt privacy, rather than a fiendish plan to spy on people.
They certainly did not need to keep full packet contents though, just IP/Macs of nearby address to map to an approximate lat/long
You can't build personal profiles based on that data, but that is what Google does for a living. They have an incredibly dense set of personal information from gmail, adsense, doubleclick, search, etc. What's the additional information they could possibly gain from arbitrary street view payload fragments?
I'm usually very concerned about the impact of Google's information collection on my privacy, but in this case I just don't see how it fits in with any kind of goal they might have.
My diagnosis would be one of institutionalized compulsive hoarding. Maybe Googlers just don't have it in their genes to let go of any information they got, regardless of how useless it may be. Or maybe we need a new term: BBDR - Blind Big Data Rage :-)
I suppose that logically if one of the google founders had a similar approach to dealing with privacy and data collection, naturally they would hire and attract people with similar attitudes.
I've seen from google employees a general sense of emotional detachment and even contempt of their own customers that I haven't seen in other successful tech companies... it's as if they're not really dealing with fellow human beings.
It's no wonder that they haven't been successful with creating meaningful social services. On an institutional level, they just don't get or even respect how normal people think. Too bad for them...