So I have to change my custom Wi-Fi SSD (something that I like) and add a brain-dead suffix called "_nomap" to prevent Google from tracking me? Who the hell greenlights such changes?
I don't see how using public router SSIDs as a landmark is "tracking you." If you use Google location services to determine your location based on your SSID or others, particularly while logged in to a Google account, then in some sense they're tracking you.
Not all wifi networks are stationary. I doubt most people know to add a _nomap to their hotspot name to avoid being tracked.
No we don't.
> collecting data from people's networks using their Google Maps wifi-sniffing vehicles
That was an error due to misconfiguration, failing to discard the data beyond that which identified the network for location mapping.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
Even that story portrays the payload collection as basically one "rogue" engineer's intention, not a part of a business or project plan. While other engineers accessed the collected payload data later, they may have reasonably assumed that if they had it, someone had ok'd it.
So rather than a coding error, it was an organizational failure to oversee the engineers' work, the FCC's report says as much.
1. we didn't do it
2. we did it by accident in small cases
3. we did it by accident in worse cases
4. we did it intentionally but one guy was responsible
5. we did it but it was just one rouge dev. team
Add to that the unredacted report noting that Google kept delaying and hindering the investigation and it is rather clear that "6. we did it and management was neck deep into it" is more likely than not.
Seems like basic data security to me. If my credit card number (valuable data) is posted to the dark web I have to assume someone will use it and it's insecure. Google has the data, so they can now use it whenever they decide it's valuable. Until I have evidence that it can't be used, I have to assume it's insecure.
I don’t think any of these are relevant to the subject of whether Google tracks the movement of hotspots.
Just like how you're allowed to use peoples images in public but if you only photograph one person and follow them around that's considered stalking and/or harassment.
It's weird to me that with tech we always bring up "well it is public" as if it is the same as our public laws but they aren't. Not only is the degree to which information can be gained substantially higher on the internet, but we have laws that would prevent similar actions in public and it generally considered creepy but the public. The only difference I see is that in public you have a better chance of seeing the person following you than you do online. I'm sure there's some psychology to this: people acting different when being watched through cameras vs in person.
FTFY
I find it absurd that we have to put this guff into our own networks just to opt out of the surveillance panopticon.
Should there be a way to tell the Google cameras to turn off when they drive by, and similarly, to tell the Google wifi setups to ignore our publicly broadcast network?
I imagine they have the right to take pictures from the street and record publicly broadcast names.
It seems like the entire specification of wifi should evolve to natively build these flags into how we manage our wifi, but even then, could we ever prevent a car driving by from reading the name of our SSID and logging the location and name for their personal use?
Perhaps the solution is that we should not publicly broadcast our SSID at all. Like bluetooth, we should "pair" and then stop the broadcast.
It's worse than that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/technology/engineer-in-go...
A Google engineer went a step further, however, the F.C.C. report said, and included code to collect unencrypted data sent from homes by computers — e-mails and Internet searches — as specially equipped cars drove by. That data collection occurred from 2007 to 2010.
Google long maintained that the engineer was solely responsible for this aspect of the project, which resulted in official investigations, some still unresolved, in more than a dozen countries. But a complete version of the F.C.C.’s report, released by Google on Saturday, has cast doubt on that explanation, saying that the engineer informed at least one superior and that seven engineers who worked on the code were all in a position to know what was going on.