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Comment by oceanstone | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that Google was really upfront about apologizing & explaining the mistake [1]. People see money signs though...

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-adm...

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If well-phrased heartfelt apologies got companies off the hook legally, there would be even less corporate accountability than there is today. I don't know the details of this case, but apologies and explanations after the fact shouldn't be a factor in deciding civil judgments.

That being said, I do wish the practice of "neither admit or deny wrongdoing" wasn't standard in class action settlements etc. eg. the employee poaching scandal

No good deed goes unpunished, especially when there's lawyers and money involved.

The article does not contain an apology. It contains an excuse ( old code ) and expresses Google's hope that the evidence can quickly be deleted. The words "sorry", "apology", or their derivatives and synonyms do not appear in the link.

Saying it was a mistake does not acknowledge the possible harm actual persons may have suffered. 'Mistake' references the possible harm Google suffered as a result of its actions, e.g. poor press.

Since when is admitting it only after you got caught being "upfront"?

Their explanation sounds pretty fishy to me:

> Google blamed the mistake on a piece of legacy code from an experimental project that had been re-used to programme equipment on the Street View cars

Somebody at some point specifically wrote code to sniff data off wireless LANs.

In order to make a map of which wireless LANs are available, you switch the radio in receive mode and then cycle through the channels, capturing all packets. Then, you filter the packets for beacons. I believe when you "scan" for wireless networks, your wireless device is going to be doing something similar under the hood.

It'd be easy to accidentally leave debug logging turned on for the parsing code. Alternatively, if you use something off-the-shelf like kismet, the packet logs are saved in /var/log/kismet automatically.

You never wrote a piece of code that dumps to a logfile more data than it really needs, as part of learning and design?

The data they wanted was the MAC addresses of the routers. With that information, then can then improve their maps geolocation by seeing what wifi networks are in range.

The problem is they grabbed more than just MAC addresses.

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