Given that one of the early team members was a world-famous wardriving expert and that the cars were initially “accidentally” scraping all open data transmissions they could find, the initial strategic/business analysis probably was some form of: what if we drove cars around that just physically scraped data from unsuspecting neighborhoods Wi-Fi networks for our advertising algorithms, and in exchange we’ll make photos of those neighborhoods publicly available.
Note that when the FCC investigated this practice they found that the data collection was definitely a deliberate design decision, which obviously makes sense given they moved Milner (creator of Netstumblr) over from YouTube to work on it.
So yeah, it’s just a fancy hacking project on wheels against unencrypted networks and with a corporate wrap on the car to support the ad network.
I’ve heard this theory a few times but it doesn’t sound very plausible: could you speak more to why you think the goal was always to mine wifi network information?
We know that Google was doing that, but I thought it was an after thought associated with street view, not the motivation for street view.
I don’t think they cared about unencrypted networks, but more about the ssid and macs of devices. Today they use Wi-Fi networks near you to determine your position when GPS is not available.
I would have gone with "they mined wifi network information to use in Android's location system", but while the data was almost certainly used for that I'm not sure the timeline lines up for that to factor into greenlighting the project.
I doubt it was the only reason, a large part of the project IMO being a show of technical prowess, a “come and compete with us if you think you're hard enough” message, but I similarly doubt it was at all an afterthought.
Location information is valuable for advertising and other uses, and if you combine many users turning GPS off to conserve battery¹ when they didn't specifically need it, with cell-based location information not being particularly fine-grained[2][3], being able to track location by wireless AP proximity is a pretty valuable extra option. I expect there would have been a fair few people tasked with coming up with ideas for how to collect enough data for it to be a practical option⁴.
[1] IIRC this was before easy controls to stop apps having access to location data if the hardware was turned on
[2] in a crowded city you might be able to track someone to within less than half a mile, but elsewhere this potential error is much higher
[3] or available at all due to reception issues
[4] StreetView came before Android saw public release, so siphoning off location data from users of that OS would not have been an option that early, and even if it was would still rely on GPS use to make the data usefully accurate
Also, many devices didn't have built-in GPS (the original iPhone, for one), so how do you run location services?
There were, at the time, several crowd-sourced sites of Wifi AP locations, which devices could use to estimate location from Wifi RSSI. So making a private, comprehensive database of the same is a pretty obvious task for a company that is either trying to catalog the world's information, or that wants to do something with location-based services on mobile devices in the future.
Beyond that, getting an approximate location first is useful, even if you do plan to use GPS. It takes up to 30 seconds to download the ephemeris for a GPS satellite over the air (assuming no uncorrectable errors), after first locking on to the frequency and PRN of each satellite. Cold-start times of 5 minutes under realistic urban conditions were not unusual. Do you want to wait 5 minutes for the map to load on your phone?
However, knowing your approximate location (from nearby APs) narrows the PRN and frequency search space (and you also know which satellites are above the horizon). With ephemeris data downloaded over the internet, every cold start can be as fast as a warm start: Just a couple seconds.
There are plenty of reasons to think that Google intended to war drive from the beginning.
GPS doesn't use battery; a better description of users is they do completely random stuff because they think it might increase battery life or they dreamed someone told them to do it once years ago.
Killing apps after they're done with them is the other big one there.
Tell that to my phone. And my sports watch. GPS being available doesn't use battery on its own, but if apps actually ask for precise location information so it gets used, that doesn't happen for free power-wise.
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.
I will not be able to prove it to you, but your theory is incorrect. As stated elsewhere, the project was kickstarted at the height of the mid-2000s map-tech explosion, and it was a loss-leader much like Google Earth and Google Maps (which were barely monetized, even to this day).
If nothing else, remember that in mid-2000s, Google was overflowing with cash and was growing rapidly. It was just beginning its transition from "search and only search" into apps (gmail, docs, etc) and mobile. Web ads were pouring in money at a rate hard to comprehend, and the "value" of SSIDs or whatever else you suggest were being farmed, was not even a rounding error.
Note that when the FCC investigated this practice they found that the data collection was definitely a deliberate design decision, which obviously makes sense given they moved Milner (creator of Netstumblr) over from YouTube to work on it.
So yeah, it’s just a fancy hacking project on wheels against unencrypted networks and with a corporate wrap on the car to support the ad network.