Google Knows Where You Keep Your Porn - The UpStream

Google Knows Where You Keep Your Porn

posted Sunday May 30, 2010 by Scott Ertz

Google Knows Where You Keep Your Porn

Google has come on hard times recently, at least as far as the world is concerned. Basically the entire globe has banded together to try and take out our future Internet overlords over at Google. Here's the short list:

  • United States
  • Britain
  • Germany
  • Czech Republic
  • Italy
  • France
  • Hong Kong

Here's what's going on. Everyone knows about Google's Street View cars that drive around the world taking pictures of your house and your work and your gang violence. What you might not have known about was the fact that Google has also been keeping track of your WiFi. That's right, they have been sniffing the air looking for any unsecured WiFi networks and logging their location. They have become the corporate equivalent of a stray dog.

Needless to say most of the world's governments are concerned about Google's air humping and the breach of privacy it entails. Imagine, if you will, being the guy with an unsecured network at home and now Google has told the world that it's there. How easy would it then be for hackers to sit outside your house and steal your data. Or, even worse, commit cyber crime logged to your house. This is just asking for trouble.

Google has claimed that the data collection was an accident but how could it be, right? It's not like when you go driving around with your cell phone it is logging the locations of every network it encounters. It would take hundreds of gigabytes of storage to keep all of that data. You would have to be prepared to collect all of that.

It turns out Google was. In a single car in Germany, for instance, there was over 600 GB worth of data recorded. The German government subpoenaed the data and Google has refused. This is not the first time Google has pissed off a foreign government by disregarding a direct order but it may be the first time the result was out of their hands. The Germans have never been known to be lenient people so there is no telling where this may go. (TO SPACE!)

Several US states as well as other foreign governments have also requested the data collected by these cars but only the German deadline has passed at this point.

What do you guys think about this? Has Google gone too far this time or is this just more of what you expect from the company? Tell me your thoughts in the comments section below.

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