Google will pay $7 million in penalties in the US for a pattern of
drive-by data nabbing across 38 states. While the money isn’t much for
the search giant, it has also agreed to long-term work to prevent it
happening again.The settlement is part of a long-running international saga involving the Street View mapping system. Somebody at Google came up with the idea that while the vehicles used to take photos were driving around, they could scan for Wi-Fi networks and make a note of their locations. This data could then act as an additional way for phones to figure out their location.
The problem was that the way the scanning was set up meant that the devices on the vehicles weren’t just noting locations but were grabbing tiny chunks of data being broadcasted over the network.
That’s where the laws of large numbers came into play. A tiny chunk of data multiplied by a whole load of scanning (five cycles per seconds) equals a huge amount of data that Google collected. A huge amount of data multiplied by the proportion of people that don’t encrypt their transmissions equaled an estimated 600GB of unencrypted data.
Click Here For More
No comments:
Post a Comment