Internet Security, a Joke?

Some long time ago, I had mentioned in one of my blogs that Google is one of the major players who is after digging up stuffs from our computer. If we are using any of the Google products, we knowingly or unknowingly share some of our personal details with them - it can be the searches we made, the sites we visited, our IP address when we accessed internet, the browser we use, the operating system with version and service pack, our MAC address, mail ids, passwords…

Now it’s official that they were sniffing on our wireless routers, whether it’s secured or not. If it was secured, they collected the IP and MAC address and possibly the number of connections. If it was not a secured one, well, they might have sniffed out everything that was possible when their Street View cars were passing through our neighborhood roads. To some extent, by combining IP address and MAC address (as a composite primary key in their database) they can even point their fingers to specific people. We already know that they read every mail in we send/receive via Gmail.  (since its millions/billions of characters, they use software to read and it’s not read by any individual. But this does not mean that no individual can access these data. The relevant ads we see on sides of the  Gmail is placed using Business Intelligence (BI)technology and those who develop that definitely need sample data)

 It is said that some (government) agencies are going to check/audit the data they collected by sniffing the wifi networks. Google’s explanation about this spying is too silly and childish. How can somebody inject a chunk of code without the project manager or testing team know? And how can they keep such HUGE data (they sniffed out data from around the world) in their servers without the network admins know? Who were taking the backups then? They say they did not use these data for any of their products. Then why were they keeping these terabytes of data they collected over many years?

It is good that somebody made this public..Now they are going to offer  (probably by next week) some secured search engine! As if they care about our privacy !

This Google story was the best joke I read this week…