[pearjuice]

How do you _mistakenly_ collect "samples of payload data"? Someone mistakenly wrote/used a packet logger, compiled/installed it on the Street View cars and mistakenly executed the service to be running in the background? How does that happen?

[barryhunter]

The logger was obviouslly there, it was deliberatly collecting the SSIDs and MAC addresses.

Possibly a debug option to log the whole packets added during development, and it was accidently left on in production.

Or the whole packet was always logged, a second process would then skim just extracting the SSID/MAC (correlating with GPS), and another process was deleting the raw logs. That third process failed.

A few big drives in teh data collection devices, and possibly nobody noticed where filling up a little too quickly.