[LINK] google misdeeds and Australia's Privacy Commissioner

[Craig Sanders]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 11:51:24AM +1000, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-23 at 10:54 +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
> > the Privacy Act only covers personally identifying information ("PII").
> > it does not cover other information. overhearing something - or even
> > deliberately eavesdropping in public - is NOT illegal. not under the
> > privacy act, and not under any other laws.
> 
> Yes, it is - if that information is being *collected*. Please try to get
> your head around the difference between overhearing something and
> systematically collecting what you hear.
> 
> > 1. merely asserting that the payload data contains PII is not enough.
> > you need to prove it.
> 
> Quite right. Although I would argue that collecting payloads not
> addressed to you is unethical even if not illegal.

this argument is about whether wifi sniffing is illegal, not whether it
is unethical.

are you confused or are you deliberately muddying the waters?


> > 2. merely claiming that google were "deliberately building a collection"
> > is not enough. you need to prove it.
> 
> Um, we've gone over this ground quite a few times. Google had many
> gigabytes of information - seems to me that "collection" is a fact.

is it really necessary to have to spell out every single word every
single time, even on things that have been gone over many times before?

"building a collection of personally identifiable information".

any other kind of collection is irrelevant to the arguments being made.


> Software does not write itself, nor do records in a database write
> themselves. Ergo, Google was deliberately collecting it. It may have

cars do not drive themselves, ergo any traffic accident is deliberate
assault or murder.

surely you can do better than that.




> > there's also point 3, which is that for wifi networks, "overhearing"
> > and "collecting" and "storing" are synonymous but that's delving
> > back into technology.
>
> Aside from a miniscule amount of state required to handle the
> mechanics (encryption, decryption, associations etc, and logging of
> some events), wifi tech stores nothing and collects nothing, any
> more than routers and switches do. This last statement of yours thus
> mystifies me.

yes, well, anything is capable of mystifying someone who is determined
to be mystified.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>