Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How does Google know where I am?

security.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 158 posts

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#81

Post by grkvlt »

mikestew wrote: post #19
pawadu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This raises another imprtant question: Is it okay for a private company to have detailed positioning data from inside of your office or home? Who would really need that sort of information? I understand how this can be useful at the mall but I think I can find my way around my own house thank you.

Is it okay for a private company to have detailed positioning data from inside of your office or home? I don't know the answer to that question, but I have a guess at the answer to another question: "is it okay for a private company to create a geodatabase of SSID strings that were freely and willingly broadcast via radio?" I think the answer is "yes". Ten, fifteen years ago, if there were an HN story about how I, ow…

Interesting point about `_nomap` which I wasn't aware of until now. See this page, under 'How do I opt out?' for details: https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/1725632?hl=en&visit_...

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#82

Post by grkvlt »

paavokoya wrote: post #66
DominikR wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His argument was that you can reasonably expect people to know how to handle such technologies safely, not that he expects people to know how to build a WiFi Router from electronic parts themselves. Using your analogy it would be sufficient for a person to know how to handle electricity coming from your wall or the plumbing under your house safely. And generally people do know how to do that. Everyone who is regularl…

I think the advanced users of HN vastly over-estimate the common sense level of the general public. http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-ide...

I think the 'advanced' users of HN vastly over-estimate the amount of information that the general public requires in order to apply common sense. As a member of the public, I have no real need to know about the protocols the Internet uses, or how Facebook and the Web are related, but it is useful to make a distinction between using Facebook (social interaction, sharing information actively, communicating with friends) and using the Internet (browsing Wikipedia, looking up recipes on Google, accessing Web sites on my laptop or tablet by myself) when communicating with others.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#83

Post by grkvlt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #63
xapata wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that probably is a legal activity. However, someone could sue for a restraining order. After that, and possibly further lawsuits, that activity would become illegal for you. The possibilities of human behavior are infinite. We don't need to and can't enumerate all possible bad behaviors as illegal. Thus the civil court system. On the second thought, I think there's some law against publishing images of people wi…

> Yes, that probably is a legal activity. However, someone could sue for a restraining order. A restraining order is issued for either actually illegal activity, or for activity whose legal status is in dispute, and which would irreparably negatively impact a party in the case in which it that status was in dispute, or for activity which might straddle the line of legality but which is related to a broader pattern of…

No, a restraining order is issued when someone is performing actions that, taken individually, are legal - recording a link between an SSID and a street address, knocking on an ex-girlfriends door to ask them to talk to you, photographing a child - but when carried out systematically, constitute a pattern of behaviour that is undesirable, and by virtue of the order becomes illegal. Sometimes the pattern itself is also illegal, if it falls under harassment or stalking laws. Generally restraining orders prevent you from doing things that are otherwise legal, such as being within 50m of some person, or within 300m of a particular place or type of place, or sending a message, e-mail or similar to someone.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#84

Post by grkvlt »

kuschku wrote: post #77
DominikR wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is different because this behaviour fits a well know pattern of a certain type of criminal. The child molester. There is no such established pattern where we can reasonably assume that a company collecting SSIDs will usually do this to act in a criminal way. By the way I didn't down vote you, but I think this is the "common sense" reason why people reject your position.

Well, but it applies to every other such case, too. You can't publicly index newspaper articles that are already decades old and irrelevant, you can't publicly index photos of buildings, you can't publicly index the names of people even. Every of these things requires written approval of everyone listed, be it StreetView, the application of the Right to be Forgotten, or collecting WiFi SSIDs. So the question is: why…

Does it? I didn't give written approval for the Google StreetView car to photography the front of my house. If I was to create a database of photographs of buildings, taken from a public location and indexed by street address, I don't believe I have to get permission, and the product could be released publicly, or even sold to estate agents or similar. I used to have to give the phone company written (or st least explicit) notice to opt out of their public index of numbers and names. So, it seems most things operate the same way as SSIDs, public information requires an opt-out to be available, not an opt-in.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#85

Post by kuschku »

grkvlt wrote: post #84
kuschku wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, but it applies to every other such case, too. You can't publicly index newspaper articles that are already decades old and irrelevant, you can't publicly index photos of buildings, you can't publicly index the names of people even. Every of these things requires written approval of everyone listed, be it StreetView, the application of the Right to be Forgotten, or collecting WiFi SSIDs. So the question is: why…

Does it? I didn't give written approval for the Google StreetView car to photography the front of my house. If I was to create a database of photographs of buildings, taken from a public location and indexed by street address, I don't believe I have to get permission, and the product could be released publicly, or even sold to estate agents or similar. I used to have to give the phone company written (or st least exp…

Well, here Google had to run a media campaign and had to wait for people explicitly say yes or no to streetview, and the phone books have been opt-in for decades, since the market was liberalized and the Postmonopol ended with it being split into Deutsche Post DHL, Postbank and T-Online.

At least for Germany Google could have stayed within of this single law. I don’t care if Google literally would enslave and rape US-Americans – they chose to vote for politics that allows that – but Google should at least stay within of German law in Germany.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#86

Post by Gracana »

Wifi mapping is the method by which google has no idea where I am. My roommate moved across the country and moved in with me, and android thinks I'm at his old house whenever I connect to his wifi router, even with GPS enabled, and even having installed OpenWRT and changed the ssid of the router. It's pretty maddening.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#87

Post by killnine »

comboy wrote: post #17
pawadu wrote: post #5

This is not tower triangulation. Android searches for access points even when wifi is turned off. If anyone (with GPS enabled) uses that wifi with any google services the bssid will end up in their database. Also if the google car has been nearby it has recorded the presence of the wifi access point at that location [1]. Before you freak out: Apple and Microsoft also use access point information for positioning, alth…

Are you sure they do that when wifi is off? I was under the impression that it only happens when wifi is on (and it seems to me that my location on the map is more stable with wifi on). That would be very not ok if it would happen with wifi off. I turn my wifi off to save the battery, and it wouldn't do much if it was still looking for broadcasts.

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=be.uhasselt.priv...

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#88

Post by mirashii »

sly010 wrote: post #25
comboy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure they do that when wifi is off? I was under the impression that it only happens when wifi is on (and it seems to me that my location on the map is more stable with wifi on). That would be very not ok if it would happen with wifi off. I turn my wifi off to save the battery, and it wouldn't do much if it was still looking for broadcasts.

Its a question of terminology. When you are passively listening to (periodic) SSID beacons, you are not transmitting anything, nor consuming any energy on your radio. One could do that even in airplane mode. It's very different from when you hit "scan" and are actively sending broadcast packets on every frequency and waiting for the wifi routers to (actively) answer. Which really only happens when you pull down the l…

> nor consuming any energy on your radio

This simply isn't true. You'll be using power to demodulate at a minimum. You'll also be using energy to ammplify the incoming signals and a variety of other things.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#90

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

leot wrote: post #11
dogma1138 wrote: post #7

GPS for a long time haven't been used as the only source of location, to some extent it can now be considered a "2nd fiddle" to INS since solid state INS sensors are very good these days. The phone receives location information from wifi and more importantly it gets location messages from cell towers, and it uses dead reckoning[0] using it's INS sensors. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning If you want "p…

Do you have a citation on phones using inertial navigation?

Research has been done before on using the gyro + accelerometer on a smartphone as an IMU (inertial measurement unit) to augment positioning; see for example: http://gpsworld.com/showing-smartphones-the-way-inside/

However the last I heard, powering the gyro + accelerometer constantly was a prohibitive drain on the battery and the relatively low grade sensors used in smartphones made the positional drift rate high enough to be problematic, so I'm pretty sure that the original poster above is misinformed. I'm not aware of any smartphones that use inertial dead reckoning to augment their positioning.

Post reply on HN