>From: Dave Dennis <[email protected]>
>>
>> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/WiFi-data-collection-update.html
>>
>
>How does one mistakenly store gigs worth of data for 3 years? And then do
>nothing with it?
Because the only thing Google can use to accomplish its goal is something
called a "packet-sniffer", which records all packets.
Every wifi device is assigned a unique serial number (often called the "MAC
address"). This serial number is put into every packet the device sends. Google
records the location of devices by recording the packets sent by that device,
and their GPS location.
This means that even without a GPS, you can look at the list of nearby wifi
access-points, and figure out your probable GPS location by querying the Google
database.
A "packet-sniffer" is nothing special. When your computer is turned on, it is
receiving all the wifi packets anyway (on that channel). If the packet doesn’t
belong to you (doesn’t have the right serial number), your computer immediately
discards it. The way a packet-sniffer works is by suppressing this bit, causing
ALL packets to be captured, even those not destined for your computer.
Presumably, Google also wrote software on top of the packet-sniffer to limit
the data collected (like "slicing" packets to the first 64-bytes). However, it
quite easy to make a mistake and capture more than is intended.
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