Google's South Korean offices raided by police as part of Street View investigation

Google may be trying to make nice and play ball with all the thoroughly outraged governments affected by its unintentional WiFi snooping with Street View cars, but that apparently hasn't been good enough for South Korea. Earlier this morning, Google's Seoul HQ was subjected to a raid and search operation by the cyber crime unit of the Korean National Police Agency, due to suspicions that it may have collected and stored data from WiFi networks without authorization. So it's the same old complaint the rest of the world's been dealing with, only the zeal of the methodology seems to have been turned up to 11. It'll be interesting to see if this raid uncovers anything more salacious than what we already know; we'll keep you posted if it does.

[Thanks, D. Kim]

[Blaque14K Posted Aug 10th 2010 10:57AM]

@A25i If this info is so important to a person why would they be broadcasting it on an open network. Yes I believe Google should not have been snooping but if you ate just sending the data out into the public? It's like pasting your social on the side of your car.

[nick1austin Posted Aug 10th 2010 12:40PM]

@peterwarbo
Googles intention was to collect was the MAC address of every WiFi router. That means they can sell location-dependant services (e.g. advertising) even when a GPS is not available.

[afuzzyllama Posted Aug 10th 2010 8:35AM]

ZERG RUSHHHHHHH!!!!

[mform112 Posted Aug 10th 2010 8:48AM]

Oh it's a "ZERG RUSH" how cute...

I wonder how people would have reacted had this happened in Saudi Arabia instead of S.Korea.

[smartin007 Posted Aug 10th 2010 9:58AM]

@mform112
This would not be a problem. I think all the Saudi networks are shielded from western eyes with the wifi Burka

[scottnz Posted Aug 10th 2010 9:21AM]

I hope when the door was smashed down all the servers went into self destruct mode. and a big finger to the govt.

[Generic Posted Aug 10th 2010 9:34AM]

My cellphone is advanced beyond advancementization and has a superiorous camera that functions as both a still pictures and moving videos capturing device. I will not publish my email on engadget in case South Korea decides to track my emailing to find me and swarm my house since I have images of all the public places I have been to with me in the foreground while I am holding my phone with one hand and simultaneously showing my teeth to camouflage my face.

To preserve my anonymity I decided to publish all my self portraits on http://www.wikileaks.org/ because they don't save sender information when they receive data.
;)

[Generic Posted Aug 10th 2010 9:43AM]

@Sicarius123 oh come on. Having a look at the world around you is not an evil thing. Now where did you save your passwords :|

[PinchofSalt Posted Aug 10th 2010 10:06AM]

Nothing more than a witch hunt.

Their government having things they want to distract the public from?

[spectremanLIVE Posted Aug 10th 2010 10:09AM]

@reicheboars

I thought Kusanagi worked in Japan...

[InnocentEd Posted Aug 10th 2010 10:38AM]

Talk about a waste of Government resources. The only reason they did this was to see if there was anything they could find to try and get money out of Google.
I hardly expect they care about the citizens here, its about protecting ones interests.

You folks seem to have forgotten how Govt. operate mostly as big corps themselves.

The general public has no idea about any of this, and could care less anyways. When is the last time you checked which applications on your phone use all your information?

[SlappySquirrel Posted Aug 10th 2010 2:08PM]

"unintentional" wifi snooping my ass. You don't just accidentally write, debug, and utilize code like that, as well as store all the data captured by that code, unintentionally.

Reminds me of when it was discovered that the RealPlayer was sending everyone's playlists back to Real's servers for analysis, and Real insisted that it was an accident. You don't accidentally write fully functional code and unintentionally slip it into a shipping product and accidentally have the databases set up to store all this data.

Google is being every bit as disingenuous here as Real was about their data theft fiasco in the '90s.

[KrazyCalvin Posted Aug 10th 2010 2:27PM]

Wouldnt it be crazy if the cyber crimes police there find out that google is really 8 years into a 11 year plan to overthrow the worlds population. Google is Big Brother!

[lip Posted Aug 10th 2010 2:53PM]

South Korea is one crazy country...if you are in the controlling caste of the country, there is nothing you can possibly do that is illegal...outside of this caste, anything you do can possibly be illegal, if it's convenient for the ruling caste...