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< rant><br>
<br>
>>>So, it is less sinister than what it sounds like. A flub,
but not out of malice, rather oversight and poor processes.<br>
<br>
Not even close. It's absolutely every bit as sinister as you can
imagine. And it's not malice, it's pure marketing via collecting your
personal information.<br>
<br>
Your take: Google is building an alternate GPS. Because that would be
a nice thing to do for your mom. <br>
<br>
My take: Google is building an alternate to GPS. They will then
'give' that away by burying it in advertising. You folks are still
thinking of the actions of 2000 Google. Google today does everything
for $'s, though they are trafficking hard on the good will they built
in the tech community years ago. So, connect the dots. They scraped
people's emails and private information including mac addresses (Anyone
up for a refresher on how much personal information is worth that
includes location?). They are then going to use that to sell
advertising. It's quite as direct as that. And there tactics are
little different than my writing a scraper to harvest email addresses
off of 'public' websites. That's also quite legal in Canada - as is
then using those emails to send out commercial ads. Android isn't any
accident - they're going after every mobile advertising dollar they can
get.<br>
<br>
If you want an example of how Google's changing, search on 'toronto
mortgage rates' and compare what that screen looks like to Google
2000. You'll probably think it's the same. But it's not. Above the
fold, my screen shows 5 organic search results. It also shows 11 ads.
And 3 'local' results. So, do you put the local ads as organic results
or paid ads? Well, in the US Google's been rolling out a paid feature
for those local results. Which by my count means 14 paid ads and 5
organic results(at the bottom of the page). Almost a 3 to 1 ratio of
paid to organic results, and the organic results are pushed way down
the page. And they've moved the paid ads on the right physically
closer to the middle column to increase clicks on the paid ads. How
can you call that an organic search engine when 75% of the page is
advertising? <br>
<br>
In short, to see this as innocuous you have to assume Google didn't
know this information would be collected - doubtful. You then have to
assume that they're doing this for friendly purposes. That assumption
directly contradicts almost every action they've taken in the last
years. We're like a frog in a pan of warm water, and Google's turning
up the heat.<br>
<br>
I know I sound a bit like a whack job on this. I'd like to think that
I'm not. I'm probably the worst capitalist on this list :). But I
follow Google closely and I have not seen old school Google in a couple
of years now. Everything coming out of the plex is insiduous
marketing, nothing is free. Almost everything they do or test is based
around increasing advertising results.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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<br>
On 21/06/10 05:04 PM, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTikDmuoN-nEY8WY0mR98S8SqxWhvizT6rFyvWjvj@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">It was in a sense accidental, because they used an
existing open source technology to capture wifi packets (Kismet, and
something called gslite along with it).<br>
<br>
Background: Google wants to build an alternate to GPS navigation in the
cities, so any Wifi enabled device will be able to listen to what
access points are out there and then query Google's database online and
deduce its exact location. For this, they need the MAC address, and the
signal strength.<br>
<br>
Here is their patent for it<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10005017/google-trying-to-deduce-wireless-location-info-bypass-carriers/">http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10005017/google-trying-to-deduce-wireless-location-info-bypass-carriers/</a><br>
<br>
So, they recorded what the tool provided, not that they intentionally
wanted to capture the other stuff. This happened to contain packets
that had email fragments, HTTP, or other stuff that just happened to be
on the air at the time, and unencrypted.<br>
<br>
Where they went wrong is not filtering this data to only what they need
(MAC address, signal strength) and/or discarding it quickly.<br>
<br>
Here is a report by a consulting firm on that incident<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html">http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html</a><br>
<br>
Specifically:<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/friedberg_sourcecode_analysis_060910.pdf">http://www.google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/friedberg_sourcecode_analysis_060910.pdf</a><br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/19/1635200/Why-Googles-Wi-Fi-Payload-Collection-Was-Inadvertent">http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/19/1635200/Why-Googles-Wi-Fi-Payload-Collection-Was-Inadvertent</a><br>
<br>
So, it is less sinister than what it sounds like. A flub, but not out
of malice, rather oversight and poor processes.<br>
-- <br>
Khalid M. Baheyeldin<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://2bits.com">2bits.com</a>, Inc.<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://2bits.com">http://2bits.com</a><br>
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.<br>
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger W.Dijkstra<br>
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -- Leonardo da Vinci<br>
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