Re: Google Maps offering to "map our locations"....concerns??

[Justin Azoff <JAzoff () ALBANY EDU>]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 01:21:45PM -0500, Heath Barnhart wrote:
> I agree with this as well. There's a difference between walking around with
> your wifi adapter on and seeing what you see and actually capturing
> information, which I believe if anyone of us got caught doing would land us in
> a federal prison.

There isn't a difference though.. unless by "see" you mean display to
the screen and "capture" you mean write to disk.

> I would suggest, if asked for opinion by administration, that a stipulation be
> made that Google only be allowed to do passive scanning of the network only.
> That way they can still gather their WiFi location data if they want but not
> get user data.

"passive scanning" confuses two different concepts.  What google did
originally that got them in trouble was completely passive data
collection and didn't even involve any type of scanning.

What google had intended on doing was to capture the unencrypted 802.11
beacon frames which contain the SSID and BSSID.  They accidentally
captured all 802.11 frames, including those from people using insecure
wireless networks.  The only reason why google every captured user data
was users were being stupid and broadcasting their data in the clear
into public areas.

-- 
-- Justin Azoff
-- Network Security & Performance Analyst