[justcommenting]

so everyone should have to choose between having their home router's info added to large, aggregated databases and reconfiguring/not operating a router?

i know plenty of people for whom that's not a choice they're likely to know about. perhaps mozilla/google shouldn't be able to dictate my SSID or its visibility just because they don't want to incur the cost/complexity of obtaining affirmative, informed consent.

[publicfig]

Yes, everyone should have to chose that. This should be a choice to make when you are broadcasting a signal out beyond your property. This would be like arguing that your wireless network shouldn't show up in the dropdown list you see when trying to connect to a wifi network. If it's a major concern, then you always have the possibility of using ethernet, but this information is publicly available.

[justcommenting]

I understand the spirit of your comment, but the number of non-technical people, especially in cities, that even know when signals are being broadcast outside their homes is likely quite small. And it's probably almost never deliberate.

If technology perfectly reflected people's intentions for their devices, I think we'd see relatively few people deliberately broadcasting wi-fi outside of their homes intentionally and most people's SSIDs wouldn't show up on any dropdown outside their home.

I agree that this information is often available from public places, but I was getting at whose priorities should dictate whether/how the information gets collected and how it's used--people who paid for devices they may not fully understand or be able to control, or organizations that want to systematically exploit signals from them for different purposes that may be different from those of the person who owns the device?