1) What would be the rationale for such a project otherwise, per GP?
2) What especially would be the rationale to put a wardriving expert on the project?
“Data-hungry advertising network grows sensor array with cars” is far more believable to me than “data-hungry advertising network maps the world for free.”
Getting email address, CC info, passwords, names, Wi-Fi SSIDs, MAC addresses, etc all lined up with precise physical locations? That’s of value to the company. Having pictures of houses? Not sure what value that has to the company, and if it had any it’ll be similarly just an input into the same advertising algos.
This is a pretty insane conspiracy theory considering people happily give Google their CC (Google pay), emails (Gmail), physical address (maps), password (chrome), wifi info (android).
It was just a mistake in a setting. They were accidentally capturing random packets, and of course you collect enough random packets and they will contain every conceivable type of data. It wasn't used for anything. It's not a conspiracy. They did street view to do street view, which is why they kept doing it for 12 years (and counting) after the packet collection was fixed.
The “insane conspiracy theory” is not that an ad network did everything it could to scrape more data for ads, lol. The insane conspiracy theory is that the ad network decided to photograph people’s property because it’s a nice thing to do.
There’s obviously all sorts of data that wardriving can pick up that none of those services could (even if they existed at the time, which most didn’t). And obviously you or I have no clue what the data was used for. My guess is that, being a business, they used it for their core business, and your guess is that they spent exorbitant amounts of money to accumulate their pot of gold for… well no gosh darn reason.
Now that Android exists, Google has pretty good reason to continue investing in mapping. But let’s keep in mind that Android also only exists to power the revenue-generating part of the business (ads). This isn’t a critique of Google, this is how businesses work.
1) The Google that built Street View is not the soul-less, profit-and-shareholder-value-optimizing enterprise it is today. There is no chance they would greenlight that project in 2022 if it didn't exist yet.
When you are doing an expensive operation such as putting a driver in the field traversing thousands of road miles, it makes sense to collect as much data as humanly possible from that platform instead of realizing later that there are certain things you wanted but can't repeat the driving easily. Or, you think of things to do with the data you never imagined before.
The SSID collection only turned out controversial later, and they adjusted their data collection. I still don't really see a problem with it, TBH. You radiate into public space, you bear the consequences.
Yes this does make sense if you are, at bottom, an advertising company... in need of data... In which case your "putting a driver in the field traversing thousands of road miles" is called "wardriving."
Walmart's fleet, for example, drives 700 million miles. How much data do you think they "accidentally" sniffed and recorded? I'll bet precisely zero bytes, because they are moving goods, and when that's a company's MO it makes no sense to have wardriving equipment or expertise involved.
> How much data do you think they "accidentally" sniffed and recorded? I'll bet precisely zero bytes, because they are moving goods
I'll bet dollars to donuts they track exactly where their vehicles go, and penalize drivers that exceed a certain deviation from the expected route/timing.
Either way seem like perfectly legal things to do.
Right, also back to that original point: I could totally believe that a 2009 Google would run that project for other reasons than advertising, such as prestige or engineer-driven because they thought it was cool. I mean there are posts here from people who were part of the original project. Today a project like that would be beancounter-driven and only allowed if it had a clear short-term ROI.
Did Street View have a positive ROI over time? I don't know. It certainly helped put Google Maps front and center. Maybe you can think of it as a very successful advertising campaign - instead of blowing millions on SuperBowl ads you blow millions on cars taking pictures of every public road mile.
2) What especially would be the rationale to put a wardriving expert on the project?
“Data-hungry advertising network grows sensor array with cars” is far more believable to me than “data-hungry advertising network maps the world for free.”
Getting email address, CC info, passwords, names, Wi-Fi SSIDs, MAC addresses, etc all lined up with precise physical locations? That’s of value to the company. Having pictures of houses? Not sure what value that has to the company, and if it had any it’ll be similarly just an input into the same advertising algos.