pcworld.com"Don't be evil" has gone all 1984 on us. Or so it seems after Google revealed Friday that its Street View cars, in addition to snapping photos of the world's roadways, have also been collecting sensitive personal information from unencrypted wireless networks.
It was no secret that Google's cars had already been collecting publicly broadcast SSID information (Wi-Fi network names) and MAC addresses (unique numbers for devices like Wi-Fi routers). But this techie data, which is used for location-based services such as Google Maps, didn't include any "payload data," or personal information sent over the network.
Or so "Big Brother" Google claimed on April 27. But yesterday the search behemoth 'fessed up to a security gaffe of Orwellian proportions. Due to a piece of code written in 2006 by an engineer for an experimental Wi-Fi project, Google had in fact been collecting those private bits after all.
More...
Comments
Check this trick out using your own IP if you like.
http://o-o.resolver.35.176.51.199.cn3uzlqs2ep32dsm.l.google.com
You will get a 302 reply
Some people might know already that FireFox does a DNS lookup on any links it comes across to speed things up, so they say incase you are about to click on a link ! yeah thats right all 200 links in a google page to aid DNS tracking using UDP.
Now you may have noticed wiki coming in first on most google result pages and might not think much about it but did you know that using FireFox the first google result link is downloaded as a hidden page and any spyware calls linked to the hidden page are also called :(
Using IE7 you need to block/turn off (Long list)
Cookies, DOM, UserData, Flash Cookies/Shard objects, AWT, ActiveX, Java.DefautToolKit,Index.Dat Files to be in with a chance of keeping Big Bro out your lives and have no chance using Crome or Firefox that now even has folders called crome if you look in appdata.
I will try this new bowser out and report back if i have the time on the results but i'm not expecting too much in the way of privacy and will sing from the tree tops if it does what it says on the box.
Does anyone know why FireFox signs me up to BBC News feeds by default or why mozila send a redirect back to the BBC when the browser requests the XML feed from Mozilia because i sure don't.