The cyber circle of life: You get your information from Google, Google gets its information from you

The following story has everything necessary to fire up the Kos Kooks, Huffposers and a vast assortment of so called civil libertarians into a furious frenzy that ends in their demands for the perpetrators to either go to jail or before a firing squad.

Only there is a problem. The story is about Google and not Rupert Murdoch, an incidental important enough to ensure that the issue never graduates from casual concern to national crisis.

CNET sorts it all out:

Google’s Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world, a practice that raises novel privacy concerns, CNET has confirmed.

The cars were supposed to collect the locations of Wi-Fi access points. But Google also recorded the street addresses and unique identifiers of computers and other devices using those wireless networks and then made the data publicly available through Google.com until a few weeks ago.

When Google adopted the motto “Don’t be evil” we all laughed. It seemed like typical snark by typically snarky gen x’ers rapidly becoming what they had long despised.

Some years on we’re not laughing so hard any more. Instead of that motto coming off as a mildly amusing joke it has become something we hope they will someday achieve.

– Written by Kip Hooker at TheVitaminPress.com

Source: cnet.com