I seem to remember that Google once made a promise to do no evil. This doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally do wrong, but they continue to react in ways that are appropriate and keep the wrong from becoming evil.
Google Maps is one of my favorite parts of the web. Before I book a hotel room I usually check out the area from a few different angles. In part, this is made possible by the Google street view cars. These little cars zip around the globe taking images of the front of our homes, out potential hotels and even catch people doing things they shouldn’t.
But those same cars were also war driving. Really, I’m sure they were mostly collecting SSID and MAC addresses to allow non-GPS enabled computers to be physically aware of their location based on approximate wireless connections. This service, included from another vendor in Mac OS X, looks up close wireless networks and based on unique values from those networks can set your time zone. There are a myriad of other uses with mapping out wireless access point locations, but other than winning competitions at DefCon, that’s the most popular.
Those little cars that Google sends around were also capturing information that they weren’t intended to capture: live network traffic from networks lacking encryption. Not much, as the wireless equipment in those cars changes channels a few times a second… Sniffing wireless traffic is something that has been possible for a long time. But few could have sniffed as much traffic as Google given our lack of fleets of automobiles running around the world doing so.
But Google did the right thing. It was uncovered, they posted it to their blog and sought out a third party to help them to review and then dump the data. So good going Google. Thanks for not being evil, and please keep those cars running around the world and helping to make the web a more interesting place to visit. Oh and if you’re not securing your wireless networks, take this as yet another reason to do so…