[jtbayly]

Remember when they were "unintentionally" scanning and saving wifi data?

Broke the law.

If Google has a culture of "grab all the data, and use it in whatever way you can figure out to make money,"—and they do—then the real question is if they even have the institutional capability to not accidentally use this data the same way they use all the other data they have.

[criley2]

>"Remember when they were "unintentionally" scanning and saving wifi data? Broke the law."

I don't want to be a broken record of "this opinion sounds lazy and under-researched and I'm calling you out" but.....

* Google was cleared of wrongdoing under the Wire Tap Act after an investigation by federal law enforcement

* The wifi data capture was a 20% time engineer project which rolled out unintentionally, was never commingled with other data, and was destroyed without being used

* The DoJ and Federal Court of Appeals disagree on the details and the Supreme Court of the United States refused a petition to clarify any parts, so any assertion that they "Broke the law" is either ignorant or malicious, IMO, because to summarize a situation where law enforcement said "No law breaking " and an Appeals court said "Maybe law breaking" as "Law Breaking" can't be considered a rational and intellectual attempt at understanding

[yters]

Well, as long as it's all legal I'm happy :D

[skybrian]

While Google does collect a lot of data, the culture is to guard it rather zealously. Google has a lot of lawyers and all projects have to get a privacy review. The privacy folks take their jobs seriously. There is mandatory training about when you need a privacy review. There are a lot of internal rules and technologies built to guard security and privacy. There are researchers looking into ways to learn from data on mobile devices without actually collecting it. The security people are probably the best in the business. And so on.

Some of the procedures were put in place after the wifi scanning incident.

And that's not to say bad things can't still happen. One thing that sounded particularly bad about the now-cancelled Dragonfly project was that they were allegedly avoiding privacy review. This project was being kept secret from the rest of the company because it's not how things are usually done.

So, my guess as an ex-Googler is that they can guard it and probably will, at least under normal conditions.