[AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

[Andrew Fort]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Noel Butler <noel.butler at ausics.net>wrote:

>
> Conspiracy hat on now, what if, the information was passed on to big
> brother, you know, the world police force (U.S Govt), hell, who says they
> never asked google to do it in the first place, heck, I dunno, maybe I just
> watched too many episodes of the X files? [image: :)]  /conspiracy hat off
>

Given that Google was started by two kids who liked going to burning man
(and they picked their CEO partly because he went there), worrying about
whether they're working with the usgov in such a fashion is probably the
least of your worries (compared to other large corporates in the US) ;-).

That having been said, they're undoubtedly a grey corporate run by lawyers
and HR people. The engineers are generally fiercely liberal (in the US
political sense of the word), because they're generally not old enough to
have become disillusioned and conservative :).  Perhaps incidents like this
will change the informal policies of "it's easier to do first and ask
questions later".

Others have already noted that other companies already were SSID data and
mapping this to GPS co-ordinates before Google was - what do we know about
those companies?
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