Google Releases FCC Report On Street View Probe 95
An anonymous reader writes with news that Google has released the full report of the FCC investigation into the incident in which its Street View cars collected personal data while mapping Wi-Fi networks. They are putting responsibility for the data gathering on a 'rogue engineer' who wrote the code for it without direction from management.
"Those working on Street View told the FCC they had no knowledge that the payload data was being collected. Managers of the Street View program said they did not read the October 2006 document [written by the engineer that detailed his work]. A different engineer remembered receiving the document but did not recall any reference to the collection of payload data. An engineer who worked closely with the engineer in question on the project in 2007, reviewing all of the codes line by line for bugs, says he did not notice that the software was designed to capture payload data. A senior manager said he preapproved the document before it was written."
IS this really such a big deal? (Score:5, Informative)
As much as I like google, I would be the first one to complain if I thought they were doing something wrong. But let's think about this:
1. If they were capturing unencrypted packets from non-secured WiFi networks.... that would be creepy, but probably not illegal. Anyone who sets up an unencrypted network should expect that other people might use it to just listen in. Google would just be picking up information they were already broadcasting in the clear.
2. If they were capturing encrypted packets then... they have useless data.
And the car was moving, which means that in case 1, they may have a dozen packets each from millions of different routers. They weren't parking somewhere to capture all of someone'S data, but got lots of random garbage instead. I am sure all they were interested in was the BSSID in order to tag it to a location.
Now, if they were trying to crack encrypted WLAN packets, then legal or not, there is something very suspicious going on - especially if they kept it secret.
Re:what about the rest of the life cycle? (Score:5, Informative)
This is the new "agile"' methodology. There is no design or validation, just furious coding off a prioritized feature list and "code reviews" which amount to little more than some other programmer skimming a check-in and signing off.
And that s quite sufficient for an in-house tool. They were not selling street view cars, they were simply collecting their own data, which they never intended to sell.
This is not a development system for launching rockets or writing pay checks. Its not a deliverable in a contract. Its strictly an in-house lash-up where one guy decided to exceed his mandate.
When your manager asks you to write a quick program to find all the Ford Truck owners that Work in Building B by scanning the parking tag database, you do it the fastest way possible. You don't start with any more of a requirements statement that your boss gave you, you don't send your grep script out for a third party review, you don't run it by legal, you don't hold design meetings, and write memos, because the friggin Black Ford Ranger truck is LEAKING GAS RIGHT NOW, and the police won't tell you who owns it from its license plate number without a subpoena.
Not every project is a big production. This whole wifi project was a pimple on street view's neck, so that google didn't have to pay Skyhook for its database. It was a cheap expedient, and it was a perfect single engineer project or at most a couple guys to kick the code around an two or three hardware guys to assemble the wifi receiver packaging.