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[isthisthingon]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/196397/googles_wifi_spying_what_were_they_thinking.html?tk=nl_dnx_h_crawl

It's just a big misunderstanding, right kurdt? 

Actually I believe the way it went down that it was probably a mistake, especially since the data collected was shown to have been in salad form with meaningless bits of unencrypted data streaming in.  Also they only got door-to-door data from those wi-fis that were unencrypted. 

But excuses to the lions on this one 

Google driving literally everywhere, collecting not just all of our wi-fi IPs, lat/long, geocoding our entire world, and license plates on our cars parked in the damn driveway.  No they were discovered or perhaps preemptively admitted that they were also collecting our friggin wireless traffic and storing THAT data forever in their massive data centers?  No biscuit!  Bad Google!!

[perkiset]

We are surreptitiously being catalogued in a way that the world has never known.

Horrible images of seemingly sci-fi movies race through my head.

[isthisthingon]

I heard an interesting idea from an OSI director the other day at the open cloud meetup.  It's fighting fire with fire or as I said to him, it's using evil to fight evil, but I think he has a great point.  His suggestion was to leverage copyright law to make it so that if data that includes you, your belongings, or your house, or just a picture of your face, is to be used by business in anyway, that you should be entitled to the same copyright right of first refusal or entitlement to the same licensing fees businesses would charge for the same if you tried to use them or any of their branded elements for your own business purposes.

It sounds like an impossible long-shot but laws have a way of completely slicing through business, asserting their own sense of power and reason for existing.  Copyleft is only made possible through the use of copyright.  I would love the day when Google is legally prohibited from using footage of our personal lives without the express written consent of [person x].  Then perhaps the evil thugs of the music/film industry could license this valuable data to Google after they pay us a hassle free penny for sacrificing our privacy willingly.

It's seriously a concerning thing and if you think the free market is going to help in any way, or figure things out on its own with our best interests even remotely considered, then you voted for Sarah Palin.

[Phaëton]

lol... then you voted for sarah palin.

In spite of the creepiness and obvious privacy issues..

The assimilation effort is completely awesome and damn incredible.

[kurdt]

It's just a big misunderstanding, right kurdt? 

I believe it was a mistake but then again, Google seems to be doing a lot of mistakes in their business. But luckily their mistakes are only bad for general public and not for them.

[isthisthingon]

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/051410-google-stops-sniffing-wi-fi-data.html?source=NWWNLE_nlt_daily_am_2010-05-17

Give them credit.  They listened to us complain and decided to publicly claim that they stopped collecting wi-fi data, until we calmed down again stop collecting wi-fi data.