Posted on 06/30/2014 10:07:27 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected Google Inc's bid to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of violating federal wiretap law when it accidentally collected emails and other personal data while building its popular Street View program.
The justices left intact a September 2013 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which refused to exempt Google from liability under the federal Wiretap Act for having inadvertently intercepted emails, user names, passwords and other data from private Wi-Fi networks to create Street View, which provides panoramic views of city streets.
The lawsuit arose soon after the Mountain View, California-based company publicly apologized in May 2010 for having collected fragments of "payload data" from unsecured wireless networks in more than 30 countries.
Google was accused of having collected the data while driving its vehicles through neighborhoods from 2008 to 2010 to collect photos for Street View.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Well, maybe IRS should have been using gmail. Then Lois Lerner’s emails would never, ever, ever have been lost!
I would guess they simply recorded the packets they captured on the various WiFi channels as they drove by and processed all the data at a later time.
There’s a difference between sitting there and waiting for networks to identify themselves while scanning all the channels (the software you use). This is a drive-by where they capture whatever happens to be going on at the moment while briefly present.
If you can’t be bothered to minimally secure your network on the public airwaves then you have no right to complain that others are capturing what you’re broadcasting. I might add the the frequencies involved are unlicensed public frequencies.
Well even war-driving setups tend to be more intelligent than this. They will parse the traffic as they get it.
And one can argue about what “should” be done but the legal precedent is that if you intended it to be private (e.g. not on some agreed amateur frequency) then it is considered a violation of law to snoop. Google was counting on asking forgiveness later. That didn’t happen, at least formally.
People should be more careful. MAC IDs can tell more about you to Mother Google than you expected.
Are you sure they didn’t follow your whereabouts from your browser signature?
You MAC address shouldn’t be being passed over the Internet in IP packets.
Well somehow they managed to figure out where I’d been if it wasn’t MAC address. Well enough to show it as a choice when I visited Google Maps. Maybe it’s getting too late at night.
I meant to write “Your” and not “you”...
What would be clever is how they managed to do that across OS installations. And no I never consented to a “share my location” request.
If I am using dynamic IP how could that possibly be the same now, on my home network, as it was in Maryland when I was using the motel’s WiFi?
Your browser provides a lot information about your system, for example the browser type and version, the operating system type and version (including major service packs), the browser plug-ins and their versions, the screen resolution and DPI of your display. You add all that together and it makes a pretty good signature. People install different plug-ins (Adobe Reader, Flash, etc.) for different needs.
When you log into Youtube, Gmail or any other Google service they have who you are with your signature. So when the signature moves across different networks, they can track you without cookies or logging into anything. All without your MAC address.
IPv6 is different. It normally uses your MAC address as part of your IP address. Every MAC address is unique making each IP address unique. Therefore you can be tracked everywhere you go directly including everything you view online. I find IPv6 to be rather disturbing for that reason.
See #34
How you can hide (in terms of being tracked if you move around) is to use VMware or equivalent to virtualize your browser’s environment. Use a generic OS with a common screen resolution, DPI and color depth with only the minimum plug-ins needed to work and never log into any Google service with it. Erase your cookies if you allow them after every use. They shouldn’t be able to track you then.
They can do it with different OS installations if you’ve logged into any Google service with each OS install. It could be a simple as watching a Youtube video through a Youtube account. Then they have who you are and the signature of each OS you use.
Yes, you can spoof your MAC. But it requires some effort and knowledge to do so.
And I wouldn’t be surprised that at some point the government outlaws the ability to do so with normal commercial products because it hinders law enforcement.
It is big government’s wet dream to have an unambiguous way to track Internet traffic of the masses down to the individual device.
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