[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?

[jfrunyon]

They get the data from people who have opted in to providing the data to them. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3467281?hl=en#loc...

If you don't want them to have data for something which is only detectible on your own land, just turn off Google's location services. Of course, the odds are very high that it's not only detectible on your own land.

[Retric]

Turn off location services isn’t enough. You would also need to never invite anyone over or call a freaking plumber etc.

That’s the problem it isn’t something most people are aware of let alone have much of a choice about. This is Google deciding it’s probably not illegal to spy on people in their own homes.

Sure, their probably not actually listening to conversation, but consider if they where would you consider they where spying if this was the level of consent given?

[jfrunyon]

There is no spying involved. There is no expectation of privacy in data that you broadcast publicly, using public airwaves, which are mandated as public by the laws of literally whatever country you live in.