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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

Because they want to triangulate all the wifi access points. This helps you to fast and with low power determine your position using wifi on your android phone. This is valuable data and I think both google and apple used a third party for this before but have since build up their own database of wifi networks.

The payload is used to help and triangulate the accesspoints more precisely (according to the article).

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I don't understand how the actual data being streamed through the WIFI could be useful for anything other than spying. How does knowing what's in the packets change anything about how they use it for location?

It's easier to just collect every packet that passes through your antenna and batch-process it later than to sanitize it in real-time - there's handy off-the-shelf software to do the former.

That's probably exactly what happened. Every time the privacy chicken littles start up, remind them that Google has precisely no use for the random data passing through each hotspot. None. Nada. It's completely useless to their organization. Junk data to be deleted later.

Then why store the data? And why would Google refuse to release the data to regulators because "it might break privacy and wiretapping laws if it shared the material?"

Because it's automatically stored? Google is still comprised of humans who make mistakes, sometimes horrible ones.

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.

The answer to this specific question is two replies directly above your comment...

> It's completely useless to their organization. Junk data to be deleted later.

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.

Let's do it the "right" way. You drive around and collect ssid for each network. Then you discover half of them are "linksys". Oops, should have collected mac address instead. So now you have to drive the trucks around all over again. Or, if you'd saved complete packets, you just analyze them instead. You never know what you're missing until you're missing it.

Its more than just Android/iOS- their location data also works for computers with wifi as well (eg when I press the "share my location" button on Google Maps from my MBP, they pin my location down to within 50 feet)

They certainly did not need to keep full packet contents though, just IP/Macs of nearby address to map to an approximate lat/long

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