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How does Google know where I am?

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Re: How does Google know where I am?

#131

Post by kuschku »

mikestew wrote: post #73
kuschku wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, then it’d also be legal if I stand near all schools, and photograph every child with a telezoom lens, follow each of them home, and then publish a website with photos of every child and where they live? If they don’t want to be seen, they can just stop broadcasting their face and wear a burqa, right? There is a huge difference between "publicly available in every case seperately" and "publicly indexable". EDIT: I…

Others have explained it, but I downvoted without comment because, to paraphrase Jules in Pulp Fiction: "that's not only not in the same ballpark, it's not even the same fuckin' sport." I wouldn't know how to comment beyond that. (That, and your "think of the children" didn't help.)

Then assume I'm talking about photographing every building and putting a list of that online. Also illegal.

Or putting video surveillance up in public spaces. Also illegal, even for the government.

Or whatever.

Collect the router mac and BSSID? Possibly justifiable. That's like making a map where phone numbers are, physically.

But collecting the SSID?

Looking at the wifi list, I see "Meier family WiFi" and "Meier WiFi upper floor: Finn & Jan" (that's their children, having both the room on the upper floor, and family protection filters enabled for that WiFi).

I see WiFi names that are identifiable, somes that have a little poetry in them, others named as the favourite football club of their owners.

That's creative work and PII.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#132

Post by Pica_soO »

Can you trace your cellphone-to-cellphone contacts, and conclude where a User is by comparing his environment? I always imagined for fun a "underground" internet consisting of multicellular social-organism, that traffics data by handing packets over to another organism that is most likely to meet the user. In Reverse this approach could be used to trace a users propable location by finding in which social-organism s/he/it resides, and if that organism is showing its usual behaviour. (e.g. The morning Bus-To-Work always consists of a base set of workers and a set of drivers, the driver remaining constantly in it, the user has for last 2 years entered this organism at the same time and left at the same station, thus the packet can be entrusted to this organism, who will deliver it to the most likely organism the user contacted next).

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#133

Post by PavlovsCat »

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…

> Before you freak out: Apple and Microsoft also use access point information for positioning

Is that supposed to comfort one, or make one freak out even more? The usage to mean the former is very.. peculiar, and the usage of the phrase "freak out" rather than, say, "before you are concerned about this and move to change it", does make it seem like that was the intended usage.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#134

Post by nerdponx »

kuschku wrote: post #40
mikestew wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, then it’d also be legal if I stand near all schools, and photograph every child with a telezoom lens, follow each of them home, and then publish a website with photos of every child and where they live? If they don’t want to be seen, they can just stop broadcasting their face and wear a burqa, right? There is a huge difference between "publicly available in every case seperately" and "publicly indexable". EDIT: I…

I don't understand the down votes here, this is a sound analogy to me.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were in fact laws against this kind of public surveillance behavior in some jurisdictions in the United States.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#135

Post by nerdponx »

dragonwriter wrote: post #95
grkvlt wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 als…

> 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. The subset of restraining orders…

Would obsessive public surveillance not qualify as "stalking"?

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#136

Post by nerdponx »

KirinDave wrote: post #109
kuschku wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was never illegal. It has always been legal. Debates were around asking if people could change the law to make it retroactively illegal. Also: down voted again for emotionally manipulative and outright vile rhetoric. If Hacker News is a place for free speech and open debate, you casually turning every conversation you can to molestation, rape and violence is a violation of the social contract we all have to keep t…

Did you just see the word "rape" and downvote blindly?

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#137

Post by MzHN »

Most geolocation methods make sense to me, but I've yet to figure out how Google knows the location of my desktop PC, both home and work PCs, with greater accuracy than just city.

Neither has Wi-Fi.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#138

Post by lkbm »

takeda wrote: post #119
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.

This was true in the past. Now wifi off is not really off. There is an obscure setting in location where you can disable it. Of course Google does its usual, making it inconvenient. When you enable that setting wifi location is completely disabled and many apps which use finer location will trigger a popup to enable it back in order to get a better location. They do this with any setting that benefits them. For examp…

> There is an obscure setting in location where you can disable it.

For those wondering, I believe the setting is Settings => Location => => Scanning (in the the vertical dots menu in the upper right) => Wi-Fi scanning (on my Nexus 5 running Android 6.0.1, anyway.)

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#139

Post by KirinDave »

nerdponx wrote: post #136
KirinDave wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never illegal. It has always been legal. Debates were around asking if people could change the law to make it retroactively illegal. Also: down voted again for emotionally manipulative and outright vile rhetoric. If Hacker News is a place for free speech and open debate, you casually turning every conversation you can to molestation, rape and violence is a violation of the social contract we all have to keep t…

Did you just see the word "rape" and downvote blindly?

I read the whole thing, understood it, dismissed it. Vague or explicit allusions to sexual violence are about as funny/helpful/fair/meaningful/good/logical/whatever as vague allusions to racial violence.

So yeah, free downvote for mentioning it outside of a discussion that actually includes it meaningfully.

Re: How does Google know where I am?

#140

Post by KirinDave »

kuschku wrote: post #128
KirinDave wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never illegal. It has always been legal. Debates were around asking if people could change the law to make it retroactively illegal. Also: down voted again for emotionally manipulative and outright vile rhetoric. If Hacker News is a place for free speech and open debate, you casually turning every conversation you can to molestation, rape and violence is a violation of the social contract we all have to keep t…

But that's literally what I don't care about? Google cando whatever they want, no matter how crazy it would be, in the US, as long as they follow the laws Ivoted for where I live. I use that hyperbole to make it specifically clear that I would literally not care. I literally wouldn't care if they used Blackwater's army to level entire cities if the people chose to allow this by voting. It's literally the worst case s…

> And yes, it was already illegal.

Oh really. Fascinating. That seems to line up with the history.

> I use that hyperbole to make it specifically clear that I would literally not care.

I would like to make it clear I specifically don't care what your justification is for invoking that specter. It's at best utterly irrelevant and unneeded. At worst, it's threatening.

Find a better way to express this and you won't get downvotes. It's on you to communicate yourself in a socially acceptable way. If you don't care about that, then accept the downvotes as salty fluid that waters the tree of your liberty.

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