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Comment by anxiousest | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what the author is after here. I mean he's not breaking any news, he admits as much, he also links to some of the articles that were published weeks ago that do a better job of discussing the security/convenience trade offs. Seems like he missed the furore at the the time and decided to compensate with a woefully inaccurate and baiting headline.

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yes, but to be fair, this issue deserves to be more well known. it wont be fixed if google isn't blamed and shamed for it repeatedly.

'Blamed and shamed'?! I don't even think it's an issue, your wifi password isn't that of your bank account. They store your emails unencrypted for crying out loud, wifi passwords pale in comparison. It's a non issue.

My gmail is my personal email choice. I know the risks associated with that and accept them in return for the convenience of google email. On the other hand, my employer may not like that google has the password to our company's internal wifi. That's why I think there may be a bit of an issue here.

You are in no position to decide whether it's okay for your phone to share my WiFi password with a third party. It's not your choice to make.

Note that I can probably get your bank account password with your wifi password, when you'll be annoyed and hit that "ignore warning for invalid SSL certificate" ;-)

Blamed and shamed for what? I suspect most people are more than happy that they can carry their existing settings across to a new 'phone and it Just Works™...

It's convenient for the owner of the Android phone, but the wifi password is not necessarily theirs to give away. That's the problem. It's not because your friends and family have given you their wifi password that they intended to give that password to Google as well. You're trading their security for your convenience.

It's certainly a problem. I don't think Google will, or indeed should, do anything about it though.

I'd like to see routers using the passphrase to generate a long lived authentication token. "Good netizens", as the phrase goes, could ensure their routers / client devices didn't store passphrases without inconveniencing the end user.

great observation; it leads to a possible new feature for home wifi routers such as "guest" passwords or temporary passwords that expire (yes, I see that's redundant).

you really think its normal that google has direct access to various different PERSONAL passwords. I don't. 99% of the users don't even realize this is being done.

Then people go crazy about the NSA having the same access.. you guys don't make the link or ... ?

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