The Members Forum

OMG! (As folks in more youthful circles text on their cell phones.) I'm finding it hard to believe the ridiculous furor over the Google Wi-Fi-sniffing Street View cars!

On the off chance that your last name is Van Winkle and you've just woken up, let me explain the issue: Google sent cars all over the world to photograph the highways and byways so that all of us virtual tourists can see, for example, what the Drax Arms in ****terton, Dorset, England looks like from street level.

The Googlemobiles sported not only cameras but also GPS receivers and (this is the biggie) Wi-Fi sniffing gear.

Having Wi-Fi equipment on board to map wireless hot spots would seem a logical thing to do, after all, ****terton doesn't appear to have a Starbucks (making it unique in all of the known universe), so knowing whether the Drax Arms has Wi-Fi could be jolly useful should you be passing through ****terton on your way to Winterbourne Abbas.

This would have been all well and good but the Google Street View cars unintentionally captured a lot of extra information on all of the Wi-Fi spots they passed and, because most people's understanding of computer security is on par with their grasp of Fermat's Last Theorem, some enormous number of these Wi-Fi systems were "open", which is to say, they were (and probably still are) unencrypted. This meant that along with the location of these systems and their SSIDs (that is, the "visible" name of the access point), the Googlemobiles snagged a lot of private data such as e-mail addresses, passwords, e-mail messages, and so on.

PC World has the article HERE!