The Google Privacy Algorithm

It would seem those nice people at Google were forgetting the "Do No Evil" motto when it came to sending out their StreetCars with the desire to sniff Wifi while snapping Pix - El Reg:

The software worked with Kismet - packet-sniffing software. gslite then parsed header information from any unsecured wireless network it passed. Kismet hopped channels five times per second in order to grab as many networks as possible.

The paper said that frames from encrypted networks were discarded by gslite. Unencrypted bodies were written straight to disc, but not parsed by the program.

Privacy International believe this represents criminal intent - data protection law does not normally allow the interception of communications in this way.

PI said: "This action by Google cannot be blamed on the alleged 'single engineer' who wrote the code. It goes to the heart of a systematic failure of management and of duty of care."

Gslite made no attempt to parse the body of any messages or file transfers, but it also collected numerical identifiers of kit attached to the network.

The program linked the information collected with GPS data from the car. The analysis notes that the GPS system provides geolocation data rather more slowly than network data so gslite corrects the difference between the two
before storing the file.

PI's blog post is here, and it also has a link to the pdf report.

The "rogue engineer" theory was further undermined by Google's legal eagles' earlier moves to patent the network sniffing technology.

Anyone remember the "Rogue Interns" that were wheeled out at various times by companies last year when they ushed the boat ou too far?

Anyway, we have - after painstaking analysis - realised we can discern the Google Algorithm used for making privacy decisions in this case (see above diagram). One wonders if it applies more generally.....