Privacy problems
"Why is everyone need to see this as some evil conspiracy?
They were geo-tagging MAC addresses, to capture a MAC address you need to capture the whole frame, it seems like their mistake was logging the whole frame instead of just the bytes they needed. It doesn't require a conspiracy to see how this could happen by accident.
I doubt that these fleeting snapshots of internet traffic made it through the post processing into the useable database.
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I personally don't see a conspiracy. This is still VERY troubling though, it indicates either 1) They are deplying information-collecting software they withoutt even fully checking to see what it REALLY logs (which is what they are claiming.) or 2) They knew what it was logging but did not think it would be a problem since the extra data wasn't being used. This doesn't respect privacy, to respect privacy only the SSID & MAC info would be logged, frames would not be recorded. Not good either way!
"So they snapshot your BROADCASTED SSID, who's fault is it for broadcasting the SSID?
So they snapshot the MAC address of your wifi router, SO WHAT!"
The complaint is not that they recorded ssid & MAC (although some have a problem with that, I'm with you: "So what"), they problem is that they captured MORE data than that. I actually do think open access points should be fair game, but Google should be respecting privacy enough to no t be recording anything it can receive just because it can.