Dave Nikolejsin, CIO of British Columbia and a man who sees identity as the key to efficient government, writes:<\/p>\n
“I agree with your comments and focus on the MAC layer data collection going on with Google. One observation I would have re all the \u201cother\u201d similar type activity would be that no others have Google\u2019s resources and thus no others are doing systematic sweep of the western world on such a data gathering mission. As we all know the value of data increases in an N-squared manner and the \u201cN\u201d once Google is done will be a big number.”<\/p>\n
Dave\u00a0goes on to compare\u00a0wirelesstapping\u00a0with Facebook's privacy\u00a0problems and makes what I think is\u00a0a very insightful comment:<\/p>\n
At least (for all its warts) we actually willingly give our info to Facebook!<\/p>\n
Heavy duty SOA architect Gunnar Peterson<\/a> (an expert on Service-Oriented Security)\u00a0condenses our discussion to date and comes out strongly in\u00a0favor<\/a> of the arguments I've been making with regards to the wirelesstapping of MAC addresses:\u00a0<\/p>\n Google's Macondo<\/span> Street View team cannot seem to get the right combination of top kill or cap to fit on its MAC spillage. Your MAC is not like a house number<\/a> (which everyone knows and are used for many purposes), MAC address is scoped to one use. There's no harm in collecting MACs, the hell you say, there's a number of evil emergent cocktails<\/a> that can come out of this. Its not so much the MAC itself, its the association of the MAC and the gelocation and time – combining something unique like MAC with geolocation.<\/p>\n This looked like a rogue team (or as Google put it last week a “rogue software engineer<\/a>“) until this shocking announcement<\/a> that Google is patenting (emphasis added) – “The invention pertains to location approximation of devices, e.g., wireless access points and client devices<\/strong> in a wireless network.”<\/p>\n It seems pretty obvious that any number of permutations of problems<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0will result by combining private client data and geolocation. Maybe Google books should scan a copy of J.C. Cannon's book “Privacy: What Developers and IT Professionals Should Know”<\/a>\u00a0and Stefan Brands Primer on User Identification<\/a>. \u00a0In both works you see the risks of promiscuously mixing identification cocktails and the unexpected leakages that result. In addition, what does benefit to the user who is being spied upon does all this spying create…?<\/p>\n [More here<\/a>]<\/p>\n It's true that\u00a0J.C. and Stefan both do a great job of helping explain the issues at play here, and I advise people who want to understand the issues better to check out their work.<\/p>\n