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Street View = Wireless View? Oh boy

Umm. Hi. Google? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?

Man, I wish I could end my post right there. It sums everything up so beautifully. Allow me to explain.

Back on Friday, May 14th, Google announced on its blog that it has been inadvertently collecting data from unsecured wireless networks as its Street View cars have roamed the streets of the world for the past 4 years. At first Google said the only things they  were actually collecting were SSIDs (the names of the wireless networks) and MAC addresses of the wireless routers. Well...they lied. Apparently they also managed to collect some 600 gigabytes of transmitted data in more than 30 countries. By today's standards, 600 GB isn't an astronomical amount of data, but it's about 600 GB more than I would like them to be collecting. And for some reason I don't think I'm alone in thinking that. Thankfully I secured my wireless network. But did you?

Google says that it has not used any of the data for anything, nor will it show up in their search engine, or elsewhere. Can we believe that, though? Once Google was aware of what was happening, it segregated the collected data onto another network, which was then "disconnected to make it inaccessible." Inaccessible to who? My goldfish? Call me crazy, but I feel like if something can be disconnected, it can probably be reconnected. Especially by the same people who disconnected it. I don't know. That's just a hunch.

The obvious question, of course, is how did this even happen in the first place? Turns out there was a slight "oversight". I can't possibly explain it any better than Google did themselves, so here you go:

"In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."

Okay. More questions for you, Google: Why did you want to collect SSID and MAC info to begin with? I think my favorite line is "code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data." What purpose could this possibly serve other than to collect payload data from the unsecured networks? And how do you not know what your code is really doing? Either you suck at testing your own products, or you suck at lying. Pick one, and explain yourself.

Now, Google is (at least in theory) working to get rid of the data it has collected. Data from Ireland has apparently been deleted, with confirmation from a third-party. Again, here is the link to Google's blog, and you will see at the top there is an update regarding this matter. Woah. 1 country has been taken care of in 10 days, and counting. Let's do the simple math here. There are over 30 countries involved, so at a minimum of 10 days per country, we'll still be dealing with this next year. Not exactly a blistering pace. That should give them plenty of time to fabricate a nice little story for us while they exploit the data as much as possible. Way to hustle, Google.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?

-Mike