“Greater Choice”
parislemon.com
parislemon.com
I understand Google screwed up in this area before, when they captured network traffic. (Even then, it seems they captured that data due to oversight, not some nefarious scheme.)
There are lots of huge privacy issues in the world; I don't think a database of approximate wifi locations ranks particularly highly. I don't care if Google map my hotspot, and I'm happy to have my phone locate quickly, when I'm out and about.
And they are now providing a way to opt-out, for the people that feel strongly about it; its not trivial to implement, but I can't think of a way of making it easier.
It seems a lot less complicated for an end-user than robots.txt is in the related scenario of web scraping.
That blog post is full of vitriol; I don't think its adding much constructive discussion, or insight; I think its just blowing things out of proportion.
Have you ever tried to tell someone nontechnical how to reboot their router over the phone?
"Just unplug it and plug it back in" "Unplug what?" "The router - the thing with the network cables in it" "The one with the tv cable?" etc.
Now try to tell them how to reconfigure their SSID, and then reconfigure all their connected devices to match.
What he said. At some point, if people want to eat, they need to belly up to the big table called society. The Enlightenment came with great discussion of the social contract for good reason. Opting out of the social contract is a hard problem. Even the guy in the forest was born to a mother. Even the orphan depends on someone to survive the first years of life. Anyone who can formulate solid arguments got an education that someone provided and paid for.
You're router is a flashlight shining in the GHz range. If it was in the visible range, your neighbors would get an injunction because it would keep them up at night.
Suddenly it becomes a burden.
Whether its in the public interest is a tradeoff between the utility provided vs the privacy loss. I think its a net utility gain - I like my phone to resolve quickly, and see little downside - so I have no general objection.
Some people might object strenuously to this information being gathered; they now have a mechanism - albeit kludgey - to opt-out.
Could the opt-out be implemented better?
You say you don't accept 'its too hard' as an excuse. But sometimes there's a limit to how well a problem can be solved, given its importance and the set of people who care about it. You could build a physical switch on the router (perhaps even one that appends '_nomap' to the SSID). But we don't expect Google to ship everyone a new router, right?
If there's ever sufficient consumer demand, router manufacturers could add this feature. But there probably isn't going to be.
We live in a world where Telcos track and log our locations, to a resolution of the nearest cell, or nearer, all the time. They typically have our identity and demographic information. They know who we call and message, and for how long. I'm studying social network analysis, and you can infer an awful lot from data like this.
So, how do I turn my phone on 'do not track' mode?
I think its pretty decent of Google to enable this feature; yes, the solution is inelegant, but the people that care enough about this can probably figure out how to enable it.
I think anger about privacy violations should be directed at worse offenders.
"...anger about privacy violations should be directed at worse offenders."
No, it should be directed at every offender.
No, because it will render this service useless, as almost no one will know or care about it. Sad truth, but you can't have 'opt-in' for everything if you actually want to accomplish something.
It's as simple as that. In most Western countries, a citizens right to determine what happens with information about them is considered a fundamental right. The fact that the information is publicly available and easy to collect does in no way diminish that right.
It's what is done with that information what matters. And no owner of a WiFi access point ever intended their SSID to end up in Google's databases, and especially not related to their geographical location.
It crosses an ethical and possibly legal line that may not be recognized in the US, but is pretty plain and solid in many other countries. And these aren't technologically clueless countries: net neutrality is the law in the Netherlands.
Google knows all of this, and yet chooses to publicly tell these countries to go fuck themselves. Smooth move.
1) Just because you never ask or intend for that, doesn't mean that's your right: TV channels don't have to ask each person that passes on the street and happens to be filmed for authorization. There's a thing called expectation of privacy.
2) Google, at least in some countries, did in fact request permission from the appropriate bodies: here in Portugal we have a "National Commission for Data Protection" and they did authorize Google to collect that data and even to photograph the streets.
There are many serious threats to privacy in our increasingly networked world. Cataloging the location of public WiFi hotspots is not one of them.
(Also, I can't think of any other practical way for them to work an opt-out system? Mailing in your WAN MAC address?)
That wasn't the problem. Google sniffed and stored data packets, not just the location of the APs. And of course, a decent proportion of them were completely unencrypted.
See their own blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-...
Of course, whether should people have to encrypt their Wifi networks is debatable, but the EU authorities weren't pleased, so now Google is trying to play "extra nice" to calm them down.
But if you're concerned about bad guys stealing your wireless data, then it doesn't matter what Google does or opts you out of -- you need to use encryption.
Personally, I used wired, since my router is so shitty it can't even hold 10mbps over Wifi (not even unencrypted).
Yes, it is. You're talking about a completely different problem. Anyway even if my network is encrypted, it won't keep Google from logging my SSID and location.
Google should understand that in countries where privacy is considered an fundamental right, the default answer when it comes to gathering this kind of information is "no", no matter how minor the issue may be.
Telling those authorities "we're gonna do it anyway" is a major provocation.
Our commission did have a problem with Street View photos, but not with the SSID recording.
(But standards take time to develop and implement. Not to mention that the existence and location of certain MAC addresses is far from the biggest fish to fry, right-to-privacy-wise.)
Is it only "public" hotspots that they are cataloging? Are any access point that broadcasts it's SSID?
versus
"The solution is a joke."
Then he rants about how opt-out is bad and opt-in doesn't work. So what is it?
If someone cares enough to opt-out then he'll be able to change his SSID. Be happy that Google doesn't let you register your access point with Google and opt-in/out there (and while doing that mapping your identity to your accesspoint and location).
I don't see an easier way of opt-out. And i understand that opt-in is not feasible.
By the way, you have to explicitly enable this data gathering while setting up your phone (on android), so part of the data gathering is to blame for the user that enabled it, i guess. ;)
SSIDs are public, just like house fronts. I think the European data protection hounds should calm down a little.
I think talking about data protection as a failed ideology is much more interesting than talking about the last convulsions of the same.
Yet, they allow you to pixelate your house front in Europe. That's the cultural standard of privacy there, so it shouldn't be surprising that SSIDs matter to them.
Same here.
There was a huge outcry in Germany when Google announced that they wanted to start Street View there. Photographing the fronts of homes is perfectly legal in Germany (and will continue to be legal), the ability to opt-out was a concession from Google, not a legal requirement. That said, Google certainly caved in to prevent a Lex Google.
I despise the official German view on data protection that found its expression in this outcry, fueled by many politicians. To me it’s nothing more than thinly veiled anti-americanism and a reduction of data protection to limiting freedom and not the state.
Google’s freedom to photograph the fronts of homes or collect SSIDs is my freedom, too – at least if the law isn’t selectively enforced (and it shouldn’t be). Data protection’s main goal should be to limit the state and not my (and Google’s) freedom.
That’s what I mean by failed ideology of data protection:
1) Its meaning can easily be twisted and turned and consequently it can have perverse consequences.
2) Control over data is practically impossible and we should much rather try and find ways to better arrange us with a world in which privacy is hard or impossible to achieve.
Google did indeed make a massive cock up over collecting the Wifi data - and taking them to task on that is a good thing.
Demanding a magic opt-out of public data seems to be a case of privacy gone mad.
First we had PC. Now we have privacy. What is it about these things that always get taken to the extreme. sigh
The more I think about it, the more this (i.e. Google's solution) does seem the most sensible solution to the "problem"
Assuming you are ok with google street view (if you're not, I assume they same reasons would apply to SSID mapping), what then is the difference between the color of your house and your SSID?
And to head off one possible reply, the data collection issue is orthogonal to the mapping of SSIDs. I don't think anyone is saying that it was ok to capture data packets, but for the purpose of this thought experiment, let's pretend that google had properly performed the SSID mapping and stored only SSID and location of their collection vehicle.
Which is fine, it would be a huge price on society if everybody had to educate themselves on these small issues all the time. This is an area where regulation is the best choice. As long as there is no law against it, I can't see how it google is in the wrong here?
Perhaps GOOG feel privacy is only the concern of people that have enough nouce to setup a wifi router? 100% of the routers at residential buildings I connected to wifi at on my recent trip to the UK were this type.
2. Why should I have to change my name to not be mapped? From a rights perspective, if you're doing something with my info, shouldn't the onus of changing primarily be on you?
I never thought I'd live to see arch Apple loyalist Matt Siegler post something negative about Google.
I honestly can't remember the last time one of these well-known Apple loyalists lashed out at Google...
It's extremely noteworthy.
Why are we pretending that logging locations of public WiFi hotspots is even an issue?
So, perhaps we should advocate router manufacturers to change the default SSID broadcast?
A better comparison is your house address and number: it's out there for everyone to see and it gives them much, much more information than the SSID ever could.
If someone is being stalked they'll disconnect their phone, but who thinks to change their router SSID?
No one, given that half of neighborhood networks are probably called 'Linksys', 'TP_Link', or something like that.
As a matter of interest, what were you basing that on?
Naturally opt-in < opt-out.
If your SSID is broadcast, without opting out they are adding the hotspot to their database.
In my neighbourhood about 95% of the AP's that broadcast SSID are encrypted, so this is a much wider group than just the open hotspots.
This is what got the whole process of adding _nomap started.
That's why it's _nomap and not _nosniff.
The solution to not wanting to be mapped, is Google's Opt-Out procedure. The solution to not wanting other people to read your wireless data, is to properly use encryption.
Please correct me if my assumptions are wrong. This feels like an incredible invasion of privacy. It's one thing for a user to ignorantly leave their wifi unprotected and have a few people take advantage, but it's another to look at it as an untapped resource and build a business model around it.
Suppose there's 3 access point advertising their existence around you (most access points do by default). If you know their coordinates on earth and their relative signal strengths, you can pinpoint a pretty accurate position of yourself. Kinda like GPS.
Google screwed up by collecting more data than they should, and now they are doing a little dance to appease the lawyers.
The solution is indeed a joke, because there's no problem. It makes no sense to not want people to pinpoint an access point on a map, when it's actively advertising itself. The way I see it, there's no privacy breach whatsoever.
The real problem (Google collecting too much personal data) has already been fixed.
Or is your argument that Google is using the 'untapped resource' of Router location to build a business.
If the latter, do you have the same issue with atlas publishers who without my permission put my road into their big printed books - indeed mapped out the whole of London without a city-wide referendum to check whether this was OK.
At no level is google telling people where to find free WiFi. They simply provide a correspondence between MAC addresses of nearby routers and latitude-longitude.
Instead it's used to correlate publicly transmitted SSIDs with longitude and latitude. Such a database allows wifi-capable devices (including your laptop's browser) to somewhat reasonably geolocate without GPS (or, more common, more quickly but less accurately before a GPS fix is available).
Anyone outraged about this needs to extend the same outrage to Apple, Skyhook, among many others doing exactly the same thing. With no mechanism of opting out at all (because, really, opting out is ridiculous anyways).
HN, to some degree, is hijacked (including its own administration that hellbans people who hold contrary opinions). Somehow this useless rant by Siegler -- about a complete non-issue -- sits at #4. Another useless article, quoting Gruber, hit the front-page yesterday.
If I could exclude the votes of anyone who hit up arrow on either of those, HN would be a much more interesting site.