Street View , one of Google ’s coolest and move privacy - appal service of all clip , has just caught another black eye : CNET reportsthe WiFi - scan railway car register millions of roving devices — plus their locations . And then released them online .
The revelation is just the latest splodge on analready patched recordfor Google when it comes to not immortalize matter that should n’t be recorded . Email , countersign , and other wireless traffic was mis - slurped last time around . And now we know the indiscriminate Google vacuum suck up millions upon million of MAC addresses correspond speech sound , laptops , and other WiFi - enable equipment around the world . CNET theorise that a ride error like the one that precede to WiFi packet - huffing could be responsible for this MAC bollocking as well . Devices that had nothing to do at all with Google Street View ’s ostensible mission of chromosome mapping public locational information .
https://gizmodo.com/google-snooped-on-you-for-three-years-but-is-profound-5539395
Even worse , the company then add together all these equipment to their public geolocation database , available for anyone to search up .
Now , it ’s important here to distinguish between a evildoing of principle and one of practice . On rationale , this is really , really bad . Recording meg of thing by stroke shows that Google still ca n’t get a grip on its Street View range , even after outside controversy . Not estimable .
In exercise , this is n’t really the worst . If I see that MAC Address X was at Location Y , I do n’t really know much at all about the soul attached to that target . I ca n’t stick with them , stalk them , or other miscellaneous activeness of creepiness . It ’s just a snapshot of where a twist was . But that does n’t mean it ’s satisfactory , or innocent . If you were to acquire the MAC address of someone ’s phone , for example , you might be able to establish they were in a certain place at a certain time — entropy they might not want the macrocosm to have intercourse . We ’re all entitled to be somewhere private without a public disc beamed to the net .
Google ’s declined to answer to CNET . That strategy did n’t get Apple anywhere , so maybe they ’ll have a change of centre presently . [ CNET ]
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