[OGC]

> Because your idea of what is going on is frankly ridiculous.

Really?

> It's easy to see the user-experience story for this.

It's even easier to see how handy millions of wifi passwords might come in handy if you already have the information about the wifi networks you got from war-driving (street view).

You now have access to millions of (private) networks all over the world which you previously had not.

[mik3y]

  It's even easier to see how handy millions of wifi
  passwords might come in handy if you already have the 
  information about the wifi networks you got from
  war-driving (street view).

Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

Talk to a real live Googler (they exist!). Any one of them will tell you that:

(a) the war driving thing was one engineer's massive fuckup that was never wanted for any product, and the data was quickly quarantined (and only kept alive due to legal proceedings), and

(b) anything remotely close to nefarious conspiracy theories being posed for this .. sync protocol .. would never, ever pass peer review internally (let alone the flames of eng-misc).

User data confidentiality is one of (if not the most) serious topics within Google. Again, don't take my word for it, ask someone else.

To suggest that Google is collecting customer passwords for the express purpose of future network intrusion, or to share with spy agencies, is just ignorant.

[socillion]

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Google collects information on wireless networks for a very specific purpose - determining location to speed up or replace GPS. Skyhook Wireless is another company that sells the information obtained from wardriving.

https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632?hl=en

Are you saying this service was shut down despite all indications to the contrary, or are you disputing the method used to collect this data?

[mik3y]

I was referring to the StreetView Skyhook-like program that did exist, and yes, it was shut down after it was discovered to be collecting more than just SSIDs:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-...

  In addition, given the concerns raised, we have
  decided that it’s best to stop our Street View
  cars collecting WiFi network data entirely. 

I presume this is what the OP meant by "war driving (street view)", and not the on-device collection you refer to.

[socillion]

Wardriving actually specifically refers to "the act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks by a person in a moving vehicle, using a portable computer, smartphone or personal digital assistant" per Wikipedia.

It looks like that blog post only states that they deleted the erroneously collected network data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving

[babesh]

So the NSA knows that Google has access to this information. I bet they have ALREADY forced Google to give this information up even if only on a warrant basis (but perhaps not).