Don't Be Evil

While Google's Street View team were jaunting around the planet's twisting laneways and sprawling freeways, they were also war-driving, according to this New Scientist article.

Wi-Fi antennas on the cars were hunting down wireless computer networks, and equipment inside was recording the networks' names, locations and the unique MAC address of the routers supporting them.

Dude! Creepy! Apparently the search giant uses the data to help GPS-enabled smartphones more smart.

According to Peter Schaar, the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection in Germany, he was not told that the Street View cars would be obtaining wi-fi information as they took photographs for Google Maps.

Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, says they didn't ask permission first because wi-fi details are publicly available, and Google won't be making the information public.

He admits, however, that it might have been a good idea to ask for permission first.


Ya think?!



image credits: boetter and Titanas

New layout!

Oh by the way, for those of you who read this via an RSS client (hello Google Reader I love you did I mention that today?) I did a little work on my blog's appearance. It is a lot more spiffy now. So go Check it out!



A gazillion thanks go to the folks at Blogger Buzz for their post about the wealth of free blogger templates available out there. I was recently complaining to a friend about how fugly the default Blogger templates are, and how even with my amazing Google ju-ju I was unable to find something even resembling prettification.

So if you have a Blogger and you want to make it look nicer, or if you just like to see cool design skillz, check out the links at this post.

Google Lock Out

Link, via BoingBoing

Scary!

Google has apparently suspended the account of CrossTech Media President Nick Saber. He tried to login to his email and was informed "Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]" An email response from Google's customer support described an inconclusive investigation and claimed they were unable to reveal any further information about the account due to privacy and security concerns.

An entire Google empire was gone. Google Talk, Picasa, Google Docs, and the additional storage he paid for. That's nuts! I've had my account suspended once after trying to send a stupidly large attachment, but it was all squared up pretty quickly. I hope Nick gets his issues resolved soon!