[wadkar]

I can’t make sense of this. Are you telling me that any Android user with “default” pixel setup will use my SSID for location tracking?

And that if my WiFi shouldn’t be part of Google’s (and Microsoft as well) data collection I need to suffix my SSID with _optout_nomap??

This has to be a joke. Any docs/refs/links?

[betterunix2]

Your neighbors are currently monitoring your wifi network. That is how wifi works -- we all monitor each other's transmissions to avoid interfering with each other's networks. Most wifi APs will also monitor the ISM bands to find the least-congested channel to use, and will typically do so continuously and change to a different channel as needed. You may also have noticed that when you connect to a new network you start with a list of nearby SSIDs that you can choose from -- do you think looking at that list is a violation of privacy?

Moreover, there are companies that operate large numbers of APs across a broad geographic region, and they may have a centralized system for managing those APs -- which means that they are collecting information about all nearby wifi stations (including client devices) across a broad region in a single place. Do you have a problem with that practice or view that as a violation of privacy?

Radio is not private (except, possibly, cellular services, which may be treated as phone services with legal restrictions on wiretapping), especially when you are talking about unlicensed operation.

[ratww]

Monitoring something in good faith to avoid interfering with it is completely different from performing a mass-gathering of potentially personal identifiable information in the form of MAC, SSID and geographical position and putting it in a database for making money.

What Google is doing is a cool hack and might be fully legit, but it's foolish to claim there's no potential privacy issues in it.

[betterunix2]

Would you make the same argument about a WISP that monitors wifi beacons across a large geographic region to coordinate its frequency selection for some proprietary wireless protocol used in its backhaul links (which it then makes money on by selling ISP services)?

Broadcasting your SSID from a fixed station means forfeiting privacy rights over the SSID. You have plenty of alternatives to the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands if you are concerned -- 60Ghz equipment is easy to buy and has many advantages, and wired connections are another option. I have zero sympathy for people who are worried about the privacy of their radio transmissions, especially transmissions on the unlicensed bands. Radio by its nature is not private.

As for the monetization issue, is that really the argument here? You have no problem with open-source location databases like OpenWLANMap, which is literally the same thing as Google's database but without any profit motive? That seems pretty weak. Heaven forbid someone should make money doing something that is otherwise unobjectionable...

[tcmart14]

Its fine, except for the opt-out. I avoid google services in every way possible and as mentioned in another's posters comments, if I am using a google service it is due to the choice of some other service I use. What is ridiculous is the opt out strategy because if n number of companies start doing something like this and I have to keep appending stuff to my ssid name and reconnecting my devices, it now creates an unnecessary burden.

If people want to partake, fine. But don't make it a burden for me to opt out. AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, most people are not tech people and will not even know of this and many are not technically savvy to know how to change their SSID if they even know where to find out how to opt out. Many WAPs around me still have their default ssid from the box from their ISP provided device and probably only WAP because thats that the cable guy had them do when he plugged the box in.

[betterunix2]

Honestly, this is the equivalent of Google's web crawler. You may not have signed up to have your website indexed by Google's search engine, but it would be impractical and completely unreasonable for Google to have an opt-in web index. Any reasonable person understands that wifi network names are publicly viewable, because it is extremely common to view a list of nearby SSIDs; one need not be a technical expert of any kind to understand that. If you are concerned about the privacy of your wifi beacons you have many options to avoid others receiving the beacons, the most obvious being to not use wifi.

Google should be given credit for offerring an opt-out -- they had zero obligation to do so and there is zero expectation of privacy in this case (it is no different from collecting a database of street addresses -- anyone can drive down a street and write down all the house addresses, and nobody has a right to object to that).

[Retric]

If they limited themselves to their own vehicles you might have a point, but that’s not what their doing.

People should have a reasonable expectation of privacy when their SSID isn’t deductible past their private land. It’s spying cellphones not street vehicles that’s collecting most of this data. And for what benefit?

[kllrnohj]

All Apple devices do this by default as well, and they don't seem to publish an opt-out for it. Possibly they also follow the _nomap suffix as a few others do, but seems more likely they just don't let you opt-out at all.

> If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers (where supported by a device) in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056

[jkaplowitz]

Mozilla will also respect the Google opt-out suffix for their own WiFi data collection; Apple collects this data too but offers no published way to opt out.

[jfrunyon]

When a user's phone attempts to get a location fix, it will use the beacons which are publicly transmitted by Wifi networks around it (I assume it's the BSSID/MAC address, specifically) to reference against (or update) a Google database mapping those BSSID's to coordinates.

[mike-cardwell]

Yes. That is precisely what you're being told. The Google evidence is linked upthread. Although, I've just done a search and it looks like the Microsoft feature that required the "_optout" substring was removed at some point. I'm going to leave it in my SSID for posterity.