Maybe your LG phone is using the skyhook wireless service? It's not like this is a new thing. The iPhone has been using wifi data for location since 2008 (at least thats when the article I googled for was written).

IMO collecting a mac address/SSID and pairing it with a GPS location isn't really a very terrible thing. The only way they can identify that your using that wireless connection is if the software your using sends it to them. And on android it can be disabled.

And if you really don't want that data to be collected in the first play, don't broadcast the SSID. The SSID is broadcast to let devices know its there for use, so I think the information in it should be fair game otherwise everyone walking past your house with a wifi enabled phone would be breaking the law.

This has been a beat up from the start, if people are foolish enough to leave their wireless unencyrpted then Google is the least of their worries. What is surprising is that the Police bothered to investigate it, and more surprising still that the Privacy Commissioner is still looking into it. I think we know why they have a back log at the Privacy Commission - they waste time on things like this.

Nice blog. I agree it seems to be a case of double standards. Perhaps it reflects how Google views its relationship with New Zealand - less important than France, Ireland, Denmark and Austria. No excuse though. Given Google's power as a company - it needs to be honest. Or people won't continue to use it. Gone are the days where people take whatever a conglomerate throws at them without questioning its integrity.

I would never trust a company that harvests more information than all the governments of the world combined.

"Don't be evil" is a joke at Google these days. There actions indicate they are just as evil as ever other company out there and even more so in alot of cases due to there underhanded way of using data provided or obtained by them.

Shame on you Google!

Really, who cares? When you start collecting very large quantities of data, it summarises and averages to meaningless mush. its impossible to find out anything about individuals, and even if its not I don't care if people know what I do online. Its mostly boring.

I think YOU, the media are the ones who should feel sorry. You should all apologize for sensationalizing and mis-communicating what was a fairly mundane and innocuous data scrape. It's a SSID and a location, not private data. It's public data, because people made it public.

Sure, Google could have been more transparent, but the ignorant media frenzy certainly didn't do anything to assuage public fears.

Really? It's to the point where YOU are going to quote Acts when the police finish a months-long investigation and say there's been no wrongdoing?

You'd have to reach very far to successfully argue that it's possible to know before your device finds a wifi network that that network is not intended for you, and then argue even further that your computer storing information such as the name of that network counts as "reproducing" information from that network. And at that point all you've done is criminalise every single user of wireless devices because they aren't designed to selectively and psychically ignore broadcast signals.

The wording of the law and the intentions of the law are different and likely were not intended to cover this sort of thing. The law is written to prevent acts such as using scanners to listen in on police radio.

Google are likely to not fall foul of that law. Wifi complies to a specification and broadcasting according to that specification implies certain things whether or not that was what the user intended.

The spec says something like: "To make your access point presence known to Wifi gear, broadcast your SSID according to protocol xyz.". If you have set up your wifi system to broadcast an SSID and MAC without encription then, according to the specs, your networking system is advertising its presence and is inviting connections. By using a specification like this you are actually requesting that other compatible equipment listen to you and take heed of your existence. Now that might not be what the user intended, but that is what they have configured the system to do.

I'm pretty sure that Google did not actually snoop into the private networks to extract info. All they seem to have done is record SSIDs etc that people broadcast.

By a very tight-assed reading of the Act, some uses of GPS are illegal. For example the reception of L2 channels for RTK could be considered illegal since those signals are not intended for reception by non-military users.

I rolled my eyes when the media reported that Google were potentially stealing bank account information... even over an open network, it is virtually impossible to read information going through a secure connection. EVERY bank in New Zealand has secure "HTTPS" facilities available, making this point nothing more than sensationalist rubbish.

And now I find out all they harvested is the SSID and GPS location? I always took everything the media said with a grain of salt, but this is just rediculous... way to lose your credibility, guys.

Matt