> So a car that drives around taking pictures also accidentally is
> listening on the 2.4GHz band.  That's plausible, if they're wifi-ing the
> images from the roof cameras to the computers in the trunk of the car.
>
> And it's also accidentally recording all the SSIDs it finds.  That is
> explanable by the fact that they might be debugging their code as they
> go along, so they're also running a wifi-enabled packet sniffer at the
> same time.
>
> And it's also accidentally recording the mac addresses associated with
> that SSID.  Still in the realm of possibly accidental.
>
> And it's also associating the GPS coordinates where that SSID/Mac combo
> was seen.  Now we've moved into definite deliberate territory.

All the above is what the car was *meant* to do (it was well publicised 
and I never heard anyone have a problem with it), the bit that caused 
problems is the saving of *all* the other data from the wifi (especially 
a problem if the wifi is not encrypted).

Actually researching a bit further it turns out the code didn't even 
bother saving the encrypted packets. The below article has a good few 
links to Google blogs and announcements with details:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/

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