[AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

[roland at chan.id.au]

Even Conroy has a point here. He's pointed out that the collection software was not written by accident. At some point it was designed to do what has been done. It may have been accidentally turned on for the data collection drives, but at some point Google actually wanted to do this and constructed the capability to do so. I don't imagine that it's a bug, it has to be a feature.

That's the creepy bit.

Sent via BlackBerry® from Telstra

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Fort <afort at choqolat.org>
Sender: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
Date: Sun, 30 May 2010 10:26:24 
To: Scott Howard<scott at doc.net.au>
Cc: <ausnog at ausnog.net>; Bevan Slattery<Bevan.Slattery at staff.pipenetworks.com>
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 9:49 AM, Scott Howard <scott at doc.net.au> wrote:

> Are you referring to Google's "intentional" (by their admission) capturing
> of SSID and MAC address details from Wifi networks as they drove past.
>
> Or are you referring to their "non-intentional" (by their admission)
> capturing of user data from those networks?
>
> From all accounts both occurred, but to treat them as a single item -
> especially when referring to intent - makes the presumption that even
> someone like Google can't be human occasionally and make a mistake.
>
>   Scott.

Scott, I humbly disagree.

Firstly, given that large/public companies often tend to behave in a
way devoid of any sanity or humanity due to their fiducial obligations
to make ever more money, I think that allowing them so say "oops,
sorry" without recourse, is a mistake.  Admitting fault is just a
Peter Sandman PR strategy - "first, minimise outrage".

Secondly, no-one is arguing that this incident is like Union Carbide
at Bhopal, for example; but in an age where your information is used
by these companies purely to make money, their responsibilities need
to expand appropriately.  The question is purely: Was their ("non
intentional" or otherwise) data collection legal, or not?  That's the
EU's case, and fairly stated.  Intent can be seen a matter of law
rather than of morality - companies aren't humans.

Personally, and as a former staffer there; I tend to believe Google
when they say they didn't use this information besides shipping it
around on a bunch of disks - they were and are collecting purely
massive volumes of data from these cars and so the WLAN data could
have been missed.  Whatever.  That doesn't mean that collecting such
data is legal, and they must be brought to account for it in every
jurisdiction they broke appropriate laws.

-- 
Andrew Fort (afort at choqolat.org)
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