Editor’s note: Some residents are reporting that Google’s Street View cameras are in the area this week. We’ve seen them in the past. Here’s an article about a damning FCC report on Google’s Street View program.
“Was Google’s snooping on home Wi-Fi users the work of a rogue software engineer? Was it a deliberate corporate strategy? Was it simply an honest-to-goodness mistake? And which of these scenarios should we wish for—which would assuage your fears about the company that manages so much of our personal data?” Slate magazine writes this week.
“These are the central questions raised by a damning FCC report on Google’s Street View program that was released last weekend. The Street View scandal began with a revolutionary idea—Larry Page wanted to snap photos of every public building in the world. Beginning in 2007, the search company’s vehicles began driving on streets in the United States (and later Europe, Canada, Mexico, and everywhere else), collecting a stream of images to feed into Google Maps.
“While developing its Street View cars, Google’s engineers realized that the vehicles could also be used for “wardriving.” That’s a sinister-sounding name for the mainly noble effort to map the physical location of the world’s Wi-Fi routers. Creating a location database of Wi-Fi hotspots would make Google Maps more useful on mobile devices—phones without GPS chips could use the database to approximate their physical location, while GPS-enabled devices could use the system to speed up their location-monitoring systems. As a privacy matter, there was nothing unusual about wardriving. By the time Google began building its system, several startups had already created their own Wi-Fi mapping databases.”
The FCC report is here:fcc-report-on-googles-street-view
The rest of the article is here.
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