Do you have WiFi? Then google to you

Google again has a puncture with the privacy of citizens. In Germany, it revealed that Street View vans scanned wireless networks and record the MAC-addresses of individual users. What is terrible in this story is the fact that whatever they do with them, it will still be scary.

If published, it is unpleasant and problematic. As researchers say information security - there is a statistical opportunity to associate the MAC address with entries in social networks.

If they don’t publish it, it’s even more problematic because you don’t know why this information was collected.

The truth in the whole story is not clear to me exactly how it turned out that the MAKs were saved. Okay, I admit the possibility that you can detect a scan for the presence of WiFi networks. But how can one detect that some of the transmitted data is being recorded?

In any case, Google, of course, is not evil, but it’s certainly starting to induce skin goosebumps. (The title of an unrelated article in The Punch ).

As the comments say, “change your mac and sleep soundly.” This is not a fact that will help. Unfortunately, I lost the link, but came across a study that with just a few factors, such as the browser line + the list of fonts installed in the system (which, it turns out, you can somehow pull it out through the browser - either CSS or Java passes) it’s almost unique to identify a person (without cookies), and changing the set of installed fonts is more difficult than rubbing cookies. So the problem is that in order to "sleep soundly" you already need to rub so much, change (passwords, poppies), enter, remember and write that life slowly but surely begins to revolve around security and privacy.

Photo: Creative Commons from 63mg_


Yoi Haji,
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