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Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

This was already a story in 2015 when Google collected the SSID and location data as well as 'accidentally' storing the actual network data from open networks [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-ad...

Also surprised how many people don't know that their phones regularly try to connect to all wifi networks saved on the device, and that this unique combination which includes things like "my town mcdonald's" or whatever is enough to uniquely identify someone and usually locate them too.

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>as 'accidentally' storing the actual network data from open networks [0]

What's with the scare quotes? It seems entirely plausible to me. eg. their process for capturing beacons were to put a wifi card in monitor mode, capturing any packets they see, and then filtering only for beacons. Somewhere along the way they forgot to add the filter, and as a result they were inadvertently recording all packets. Trying to imply that they were doing something nefarious makes little sense. The cars were constantly moving, so at best you got a few seconds of web browsing data before going out of range. As google should know, the value in data comes from being able to build a complete profile of someone, not knowing what one page someone visited was. Moreover, thanks to third party cookies and their embeds everywhere on the web, they don't need to drive around to capture your web browsing traffic. They can get a continuous feed just by operating their cdn/ad networks.

This had essentially nothing to do with web browsing packets, and everything to do with Google building a map of citizen bSSIDs and MAC addresses without their consent.

Many of the same objections apply. What is google going to do with a point in time snapshot of "bSSIDs and MAC addresses"? The SSIDs don't tell them anything aside from "there's a wifi router at this vague location". MAC addresses are slightly more interesting, but there's nothing you can do with a point in time capture with them. Even if you want to do evil things like stalking people, you'd need to do regular scans, not the once-a-few-years drive-by they do with the streetview cars.

Also to be clear I'm not claiming that it's fine for them to do it, or that they should continue doing it, only that the scare quotes around "accidentally" was unwarranted given the lack of evidence towards malice and lack of motive. To make an analogy, accidentally-exposed-to-the-public breaches happen all the time. You can complain about how there were lack of controls/security, but people don't typically don't use scare quotes to imply the breaches were somehow intentional.

Depending on the receiver's hardware, the information is far more dense and valuable than "vague location".

Yeah sure theoretically, but by all accounts they were using off the shelf wifi adapters, not using SDRs to make a quasi synthetic aperture radar to pinpoint the exact location of each transmitter. Moreover even if you had the exact position (eg. <1m) of each transmitter, it's unclear what they'd do with them.

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