[AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

[James Andrewartha]

On Mon, 31 May 2010, Andrew Fort wrote:

> 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?

A quick wikiwalk turns up Skyhook Wireless[1] and Navizon[2]. Note that a
geolocation API [3] is currently being worked on at W3C and is already 
shipping in Firefox, iPhone and Android, so this sort of scanning is not 
going to stop as it's commercially valuable.

It's no longer the weekend, but here's my not-very relevant comments: WA 
criminal law [4] requires a computer system to be protected by a password 
that is not well-known before access is unlawful. Obviously this doesn't 
apply here because telecommunications is in commonwealth jurisdiction, but 
I think it's close enough to draw similar conclusions about wireless 
networks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navizon
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3C_Geolocation_API
[4] http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/legis/wa/consol_act/ccaca1913252/notes.html#Heading3391

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