

Google Wi-Fi Roundup Has Lawyers Chasing Landmark Jackpot - MyDogHasFleas
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-24/google-wi-fi-roundup-mistake-has-lawyers-eyeing-jackpot.html

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ChrisAntaki
My understanding is that Google was really upfront about apologizing &
explaining the mistake [1]. People see money signs though...

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-
adm...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-admits-
storing-private-data)

~~~
ForHackernews
Their explanation sounds pretty fishy to me:

> Google blamed the mistake on a piece of legacy code from an experimental
> project that had been re-used to programme equipment on the Street View cars

Somebody at some point specifically wrote code to sniff data off wireless
LANs.

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jewel
In order to make a map of which wireless LANs are available, you switch the
radio in receive mode and then cycle through the channels, capturing all
packets. Then, you filter the packets for beacons. I believe when you "scan"
for wireless networks, your wireless device is going to be doing something
similar under the hood.

It'd be easy to accidentally leave debug logging turned on for the parsing
code. Alternatively, if you use something off-the-shelf like kismet, the
packet logs are saved in /var/log/kismet automatically.

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cornewut
If it's ok to collect electromagnetic emissions in range from 430 to 790 THz
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum)],
why it shouldn't be the same for 2.4 GHz?

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wlesieutre
Do you disagree with _United States v. Danny Lee_ , where the Ninth Circuit
decided that you need a warrant to spy through someone's walls with a thermal
camera?

It's all EM radiation, but monitoring one vs the other has _very_ different
real world implications.

In this particular instance, the plaintiffs had security options available on
their wifi transmissions (unlike thermal emissions) and chose to transmit in
the clear instead, so that's part of what the case is discussing.

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zaroth
What a bizarre process. So if these 22 people can't find their MAC in the
.pcap then it's case closed? What if they weren't home at the time, and it's
just beacons? So only if they happened to be streaming a video from Netflix at
the time, causing enough continuous traffic load so that some actual L3
packets pop up in the scan, only then do we get to squeeze some billions from
Larry and Sergey?

Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of sending a strong signal to
companies that driving a van up to my house and pcap'ing my packets is not
acceptable. But I do hope it's proportionate. $1 per byte sounds about right,
so 200GB = $200B. Don't worry, we can let them pay over 100 years. Oh wait,
there's already a name for that. Taxes.

At least this will set a great precedent for suing the NSA next, right?

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icebraining
_What if they weren 't home at the time, and it's just beacons?_

Then Google didn't actually capture their private data, no? Kinda makes it
hard to allege damages.

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iamshs
But, Google did mine Wi-Fi data of a lot of people, so why do only those 22
people are to be proven as victim. Can't the case be broadened?

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URSpider94
IANAL, so corrections are welcome, but my understanding is this:

To bring a civil suit against another party, you must have standing, which
means you must be able to show that you, personally, suffered damage at the
hand of the other party. These 22 people can't just sue Google for damages on
behalf of everyone whose data was allegedly hoovered up by StreetView, they
have to prove that their data was collected. If they can't, then other people
could bring the same suit and look for their data in the evidence as well.

Once a defendant or defendants prove that they have standing to bring the
case, they could then petition the judge to certify a class action, at which
point the lawyers representing the class would ask for discovery to find and
notify all the other class members.

I view this as a very valuable rule of law; without this, there are attorneys
who would just spend all day filing speculative lawsuits in hopes of forming a
class action.

One other notable places this rule has come into play in the recent past: in
litigation around gay marriage, when the government refused to defend its
marriage discrimination laws, religious groups tried to step in to take on the
defense, only to be told they had no standing because they were not being
harmed by other people getting married.

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iamshs
Aha makes sense. So the process can continue perpetually until someone is
proven to be a victim. Thanks for the answer.

