[p2p-research] Google Sniffing WiFi - OpenSource P2P Solutions

[Alex Rollin]

Perhaps some of you saw the Google blog post or heard about it through
another outlet:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html

In the post Google says they did collect some "payload" data from Wifi
networks as they drove their GMap Street View cars around:

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer
> working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled
> all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our
> mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID
> information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included
> that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and
> had no intention of using, payload data.


I wonder if this would have happened if they would have simply released the
code as open-source.  Then the world would have been looking it over since
2006 and the issue would have come up quite a bit sooner.

The fact that a commercial corporation is systematically doing something,
sniffing, that is possible for any suitably inclined individual to do is not
what bothers me.  Instead, I am wondering about other ways a P2P solution
could have been brought into play.  It is the fact that it was done without
any peer oversight that bothers me.
--
Alex

“It’s no longer possible for a country to collapse in isolation. Now we all
collapse.

The only path to stability is to equalize the consumption rates of the first
and developing world. Our dream is no longer possible in the new world.” -
Jared Diamond March 2010
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