You opted in when you started broadcasting information on the airwaves.
Unless I am woefully misinformed, this is in fact not possible. I could set a flag somewhere that would instruct clients not to present the SSID as an option, but I can not hide its existence; not even just the name. The only thing hiding the SSID does is inconvenience me.
So I assume if you're hiding the SSID then Google will still collect your APs MAC adress.
To me, lamenting the era of wifi technology yet without ubiquitous use of smartphones seems a bit... quaint?
To be clear, I don't, at all, think this is a workable path forward. I also wanted to point out how brief a period of time this is. Imagine learning about some issue arising from movable type in the 15th century, being solved over a period of a few decades, helping the rise of some corporation/feudality long past.
When it comes to policy, how about making APs not broadcasting a public id, while making it illegal to track any traffic on any identifiers for the spectrum? Would that be called for? Or does the convenience of setting up a new AP make up for the fact that a corporation may make a few more bucks out of an improved positioning service?
I don't know, but I still find it funny that you would defend a particular decade in the early noughts, holding these few years as an ideal.
If I came across that way, it was unintentional.
I appreciate the counterpoints to my comments, especially the thoughtful ones like yours. I think I don't really come to HN to convince anybody else of my opinion, but rather to convince myself that I have given my position a decent amount of consideration. The more I have to defend my thoughts, the clearer they become. To me, at least ;-)
For policy, I think we should make data PI data collection transparent to the targeted person. Just like I have the legal right to see collected information in my credit file, I think that legislation should be expanded so that it applies to other forms of data collected about citizens by private companies. Everything from Best Buy's contract with a private company that keeps a 'refund score' (I don't recall what it is actually called specifically) on each customer which it then uses to determine whether or not to reject their product return, to this kind of 'public' data collection Google is engaging in. In some ways the horse has already left the barn, and there is already a serious amount of data which has been collected, but I hope that before it gets used for nefarious reasons we can figure out how to muzzle it. We need a clear definition of what constitutes my data, and public data, which is adapted for modern technology.
When you start leaving fingerprints in public, there's no reasonable expectation that some parties will be able to pick them up, but other parties won't. If you want to keep a secret, don't leave fingerprints anywhere.
When you start dropping hair strands or dead skin cells in public, there's no reasonable expectation that some parties will be able to sample it for DNA collection, but other parties won't. If you want to keep a secret, don't drop hair or skin cells.
The lack of privacy comes from how the data is concentrated, combined, and then shared with people and systems beyond your approval. This is not a binary "secret"/"public" classification where privacy only applies to things in the secret bucket, and no privacy protections apply to something you are not actively trying to keep secret.