Google Admits It 'Snooped' On People’s Online Activities

IBD's Click ^ | 3/14/2010 | Michael Krey

[Slyscribe]

Google (GOOG), already one of the key players in rapidly escalating debates about online privacy, this afternoon admitted that it has scooped up snippets of people’s online activities broadcast over wireless Wi-Fi networks over the past four years. The admission made this afternoon in Google’s official blog is likely to raise more worries about potential online privacy breaches, an issue that in the past week has focused most directly on social networking site Facebook.

[unixfox]

Google has nothing over our so called government in the way of snooping.

[tflabo]

Probably learned to perfect the snooping from China.

[humblegunner]

Google works best.
Other so-called search engines are garbage.

So Google may snatch some info about what you search...

So what? They use the info to improve the FREE service they provide.

Don’t like it? Don’t use it. Problem solved.

[Taxman]

I switched to Ixquick!

Ixquick claims that they do not snoop.

[Fire_on_High]

*shrug* I predicted crap like this would happen when wireless started to be something the average joe could buy and run. If folks had secured their networks properly, then it would take an actual, purposeful intrusion rather than driving by and seeing what’s picked up.

You’ll have to pry my cat5 and 10+ year old NC100s from my cold dead hands, thanks.

[wxgesr]

No one cares, GOOG supports socialist causes and practices/sarc.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

The Firefox browser now has an add-on called “Google Sharing Enabled”, designed to defeat Google’s intrusive surveillance.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60333/

Amusingly, doing a Google search for “Google Sharing Enabled” does not lead to the Firefox add-on, but instead points you to even more intrusive Google apps. So definitely go directly to Mozilla.

“GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom. GoogleSharing aims to do a few very specific things:

1. Provide a system that will prevent Google from collecting information about you from services which don’t require a login.
2. Make this system completely transparent to the user. No special websites, no change to your work flow.
3. Leave your non-Google traffic completely untouched, unredirected, and unaffected.

“The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Add-on. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing “identities,” each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Add-on watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Google Mail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity.

“This “GoogleShared” request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By “sharing” these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.

“The GoogleSharing proxy even constantly injects false but plausible search requests through all the identities.

“The result is that you can transparently use Google search, images, maps, products, news, etc... without Google being able to track you by IP address, Cookie, or any other identifying HTTP headers. And only your Google traffic is redirected. Everything else from your browser goes directly to its destination.”

The only change you notice is the words “Google Sharing Enabled” on the lower right corner of your screen, that is disabled when you click on it, if you need to login to Google.

Other than that, you do get random “safe search” settings on Google images, that can be reset with just a click. And sometimes you get a “New to Google?” screen, asking for information, that you can ignore.

[livius]

I figure they must be very confused when they see my searches. I’m a translator and I search for current terms in whatever the field is - one day it can be oil drilling, one day it can be fish farming, one day it can be IT, one day it can be charges against a former president before the Supreme Court of some Latin American country. So who knows?

[benjibrowder]

"Google wrote in its blog that it picked up fragments of e-mails and Web addresses while its cars were taking photos of neighborhoods for the “Street View” feature on its mapping service."

What the hell are Google Street View vehicles doing collecting data from WiFi networks in the first place? Connecting to the networks themselves or sniffing the packets out of the airwaves? Either way, the smell of B.S. is strong with this.

[NotSoModerate]

Take a look at Obama’s “New Media Team”. I believe the deputy coordinator is a google executive responsible for the ad software that links email information and search engine information to corporations offering services related to the data collected.

[Political Junkie Too]

So Google may snatch some info about what you search... So what? They use the info to improve the FREE service they provide. Don’t like it? Don’t use it. Problem solved.

Did you read the article at all?

Google wrote in its blog that it picked up fragments of e-mails and Web addresses while its cars were taking photos of neighborhoods for the “Street View” feature on its mapping service.

The company says it’s found that it’s accumulated about 600 gigabytes of data transmitted over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries. In collecting data in response to an audit request from the data protection authority in Hamburg, Germany, Google says “it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.” That is, Google says none of the information has appeared in its search engine or other services.

So you endorse Google parking a car in front of your home and intercepting your wi-fi transmissions, in the name of improving their service? Even if you're not using their service when they intercepted your traffic?

-PJ

[ohioWfan]

I wonder how many enemies' lists my husband and I are on.

We're surely on the White House's and the DHS, and I'll bet Facebook's and Google's as well.

It's frightening, but I'm just a little bit proud at the same time. :)

[humblegunner]

picked up fragments of e-mails and Web addresses

How terrible.
Here you go, a fragment of my main email address:

gr.lglc

Here's a fragment of a search I've made today:

Bgpp

Big froopin' whoop. I can drive around with my laptop and pick up better stuff than that.

[Paladin2]

"You’ll have to pry my cat5 and 10+ year old NC100s from my cold dead hands, thanks."

Not only that, one should keep a few computers off anything connected to the 'net, ever.

[doc1019]

Ixquick claims that they do not snoop.

Until recently, so did Google. ;-)

[Political Junkie Too]

I can drive around with my laptop and pick up better stuff than that.

And how would you justify that? What "service" would you claim you were bettering by snooping on other people's activity that has nothing to do with you?

-PJ

[humblegunner]

And how would you justify that?

I wouldn't justify it. It's floating around like leaves falling off a tree.

What "service" would you claim you were bettering by snooping on other people's activity that has nothing to do with you?

Not being a service provider I have no way to answer that.

If you hate Google, don't use it.

Is that so hard?

[Political Junkie Too]

If you hate Google, don't use it. Is that so hard?

But the people whose traffic was intercepted by Google weren't using Google when their traffic was intercepted, so not using it like you suggest is no solution to the problem in the article, is it?

You seem to be shrugging your shoulders at the idea of a company rolling a car in your neighborhood and picking up wi-fi traffic, whether you're a user of their service or not.

-PJ

[lionheart 247365]

........ and I don’t google .