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Comment by dzhiurgis | Hacker News Reader

I don't like this being forced on you, but who the hell cares about wifi/bt SSID sniffing? What's so bad about collecting it?

You are literally broadcasting it yourself and on most devices you can't even turn broadcasting off anymore.

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On a localised basis, it is perhaps not so bad, however at a higher level, it allows you to piece together a huge amount of info, including grouping members of households etc.

Honestly, it's not a great piece of info to be leaking, if you value your privacy.

> grouping members of households

How does GPS location not achieve same..?

That requires processing the data in ways that would have to be disclosed as per law.

That only requires writing an apology for a bug after processing the data in this ways was found to be undisclosed, and then disclosing it with no opt-out.

Or alternatively, process the data anyway, make tens of billions of dollars from it, and pay a 2 billion dollar fine if the regulators find out.

The fine is just another cost of doing business ;)

My access points are inaccessible to the public. You would have to trespass deep into my property. No one has any business knowing anything about my network or devices here.

My access points are inaccessible to the public. You would have to trespass deep into my property.

Unfortunately you are up against trillion dollar corporations who think the world is their little model, active misinformation from them, blatant bribery of elected officials leading to an engineered lack of government oversight, a completely clueless population, and an exponentially increasing technical capability of surveillance.

so nobody will ever sniff them then. This is not an answer to the question.

Obviously they're concerned that their own phone will sniff them.

But what's the problem with revealing your SSID/mac address to Google or anyone else?

Also - it's still probably possible with satellites or extra sensitive gear (sats already monitor marine AIS).

I'd prefer the combo of ssid, password and location to not all be known to the same single party.

Yeah, an SSID is meant to be a publicly available address. You can always hide them if you want.

Could you imagine the outrage if people found out Google was collecting and storing everyone's home address?

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