[throwawaay]

I'm tired of people making insinuations about some sinister motive behind the WiFi logging without evidence. How did that debacle "align with Google's business interests"?

What use is there for fragments of WiFi payload data logged from a moving vehicle that also happens to be hopping WiFi frequencies? If there was any intent to exploit it, wouldn't you try to log more comprehensively? That is, by grabbing full HTTP transactions, or whatever.

Of course, this isn't meant to minimize the very clear fact that someone there fucked up. That case appears to be one where the accident label is justified.

[jbigelow76]

     How did that debacle "align with Google's business interests"?

Payload data can be used to inform their advertising efforts.

Two other points:

1. After an engineer alerted his supervisor of the "accident" it continued anyway so even if it was a sincere accident, nobody gave a enough of shit to rectify it.

2. Google still has the data two years after they were supposed to have deleted it, which they blame on communication issues as to how to delete it. Is Google saying the don't having the engineering know how to properly dispose of data if needed.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Google-Failed-to-Delet...

[huggyface]

Payload data can be used to inform their advertising efforts.

The data collected while a streetview car drove by can inform their advertising efforts? You really have to bear a serious anti-Google grudge to entertain such a ridiculous, technologically laughable premise.

[jbigelow76]

You don't think the contents of email messages could be used to inform advertising data? Even in aggregate? Do ads in gmail show up at random?

I don't have a grudge against google, I like my android phone over an iPhone and use google Reader and Chrome because they are the best at what they do, and use google analytics because it's good enough for the price. I just don't have any illusions as to what they expect in return for their free products.

[throwawaay]

Email, of course, contains tons of personal information. If linked to a user's identity, it could clearly be used to inform advertising. However, emails in aggregate probably don't give you any more useful advertising insight than the Web corpus itself, which Google could obviously use if it wanted.

Further, why would Google need to log random bits of WiFi payload data to extract a relatively small amount of email when they operate Gmail?! If the decision to purposefully violate people's privacy had actually been made, wouldn't it be easier to look at Gmail than to use Street View?

There would be more data, better data, and you'd have it more quickly than if you sent a bunch of cars to drive all over the world, collect a bunch of extraneous crap, then wait for them to come back, and screen it for something useful.

Frankly, that's absurd.