Note to Eric

Articles on BBC news about this collecting of wifi data streams by the Google street view cars.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8684110.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10122339.stm

If you brought your front door key into a shop to get a copy of it and the operator made their own copy for "research", would you be happy? Even if they never used the key, would that make it OK? No harm, no foul, right?

Playing devil's advocate - On the other hand, if people have an open wireless system then they are effectively saying, "Here is a network, do what you want with it", which I think they should be entitled to do. If you were to open up your garden as a right-of-way that would be your decision. If people trample all over your grass and reduce it muck, well that was your fault, but if people are going to be prevented from doing (or not doing) their own risk assessment, then how are we going to evolve into anything other than automatons.

Back to the original point, however; If you archive the raw data, then what you're doing is storing a potential time-bomb of personally identifiable information that could be cross-indexed with all your other data. Plus, who knows what kind of correlations could be made if dumps were obtained and traded in hacker networks. Say you wanted to look at web traffic to a particular site to look for vulnerabilities, what better way than to dig out that huge data source and start filtering SSL negotiation sessions or comparing secure vs insecure traffic to the same server to help work out encryption keys. The only saving grace is that it appears to have been sampling packets rather than streams.

In short though, it's one thing to say "your data was on an open network, anyone could have looked at it", but it's quite another to take that data and archive it, with who knows what kind of security protecting it from widespread dissemination.

If you think I'm being a bit extreme, there isn't much difference between this and Google opening up a cable Internet box on the street, sniffing everybody's network data and uploading it to their servers for later perusal. The only difference being that they'd have to answer to another large corporation and regulatory mechanisms instead of relatively powerless individuals.

in other words, common sense is something that was sorely lacking in the decision to archive publicly available wifi traffic. What's been done is that disparate local area networks, which in themselves would have little value have been aggregated into a potentially very lucrative source of demographic and behavioural information.

Google deserve to get smacked around for this mistake. Not because they did something bad or evil, but because they did something greedy, stupid and inconsiderate. Being acquisitive is not an admirable trait in people and neither should it be in corporations.