jmw
Industrial
- Jun 27, 2001
- 7,435
An interesting point comes up which is featured in Henry's Daughters.
In the video one of the issues raised is the involvement of law enforcement who wanted to access the data logged by the systems.
An interesting parallel is with Google's Street view program.
It appears that while they asked for permission of various governments to take photos, with some conditions attached, they did not mention that they also were mapping the WiFi community logging network names and MAC addresses. Most governments claim to have been unaware of this activity.
At the root of this is the question of why Google embarked on this program. It must be fearfully expensive and the question is just what the payback is? There have been objections from some about the benefit to burglars, of course, but the value of the WiFi data? They claim it helps with their mobile phone interactive navigation system.
Now just how does this work? Does it require they know the geographical location of every WiFi location? My WiFi broadband is a hot spot because I opted in to the Open Zone project that allows members of the scheme to connect using spare bandwidth on my wireless router but I don't recall Google asking permission to use it for their phone navigation system and I don't see they need my network names or MAC Addresses.
So is this all a cover for some Homeland Security project or can they really make money from this?
See this covered in the Pats Pub thread: and newspaper articles typical as this:
Guess I need to change some of these things.
JMW
In the video one of the issues raised is the involvement of law enforcement who wanted to access the data logged by the systems.
An interesting parallel is with Google's Street view program.
It appears that while they asked for permission of various governments to take photos, with some conditions attached, they did not mention that they also were mapping the WiFi community logging network names and MAC addresses. Most governments claim to have been unaware of this activity.
At the root of this is the question of why Google embarked on this program. It must be fearfully expensive and the question is just what the payback is? There have been objections from some about the benefit to burglars, of course, but the value of the WiFi data? They claim it helps with their mobile phone interactive navigation system.
Now just how does this work? Does it require they know the geographical location of every WiFi location? My WiFi broadband is a hot spot because I opted in to the Open Zone project that allows members of the scheme to connect using spare bandwidth on my wireless router but I don't recall Google asking permission to use it for their phone navigation system and I don't see they need my network names or MAC Addresses.
So is this all a cover for some Homeland Security project or can they really make money from this?
See this covered in the Pats Pub thread: and newspaper articles typical as this:
Guess I need to change some of these things.
JMW