Google’s Wifi Data Scraping – Impact to Developers

• corporate trust
• google
• rant

While many would argue that Google’s recent issue with accidentally collecting wifi packet data from public broadcasting networks will have minimal impact to developers, I disagree.

Having just left a corporate environment in which I would occasionally get to chat with the CIO regarding the pros and cons of some current technology trends, such as cloud computing, which would also include discussions around the enterprise suitability of those solutions, I can tell you – accidents like this are going to have an impact.

It’s getting to the point now where people would call me a Google Fanboy. I’m passionate about Google’s AppEngine as one of the few solutions that has actually got cloud development and scalability right, I recently gave up my iPhone for an Android handset, and I’m genuinely interested and excited by new languages like go.

All this passion regarding the technical capability of these Google products is going to amount to very little, however, when I come to pitch an AppEngine solution to the corporate that have just left (which I had intended to do).

Whilst largely unrelated, the Google datascraping incident will only increase the level of distrust (or at least questions around security practices) around many of Google’s offerings – especially cloud solutions, and while the words in the official post from Google all make sense (and I hope genuine) will mean very little when the majority of articles already read “Google steals private data”.

From the official post:

The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.

You bloody better. You’ve certainly made things tougher for me when it comes to pushing your solutions. Honestly, I’m not sure what’s required here. I don’t doubt that Google engineers rock, but it’s time for beta “features” such as Wifi data collection to be caught before releasing products into production environments.

… I think I just lost my fanboy status