I love when I'm proved right, except when the implications are horrifying.
Google is so effing sketchy.
Everyone knows Google drives down streets to collect images for Street View. Then they tag street addresses in those images, and link them to street maps. Sounded sketchy -- especially when you first looked up your cousin's house and saw they bought a new car, right? At this point though, people are mostly okay with it, because the end product makes for an incredibly useful tool for figuring out how to get somewhere new. And it's all publicly available information, right?
Well. In Germany, Google is also logging your home's wifi network and MAC address(es), which get associated with your street address and thus with you. Now, there is definitely an argument to be made that this is publicly-available information (psssst, smart people hide their SSIDs!). But it still makes me squirm, because this data? This data has all kinds of second-tier implications for privacy on the web that the facade of your house never, ever did.
The article points out too that this is exactly the sort of information that China and Russia should be collecting on us, and vice versa. And, you know, if they aren't already, now all they need to do is hack Google (again)....
I'm not sure that this is "just as public as a house facade", frankly, and the implications are certainly more disturbing, especially on this massive of a scale, and especially in the hands of Google, which already knows so much else.
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Follow up: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/technology/19google.html
ReplyDeleteJohannes Caspar, the data protection supervisor for the city-state of Hamburg, where Google’s German headquarters are located, said Tuesday that he had given Google until May 26 to hand over one of the hard drives that it had used to collect and store information in Germany, where Street View is not yet available.
Through a spokesman, Google reiterated its offer to destroy the WLAN data in conjunction with regulators, but stopped short of saying it would hand over a hard drive, which would allow regulators to see for the first time what kind of data had been collected.
To ease privacy concerns in Germany, Google has agreed to give property owners the right remove their property from Street View before the service goes live, which was planned for later this year. It is the first time that Google is giving consumers the right to opt out in advance. Current procedures let users request that their property be removed after the service goes live.