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Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

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Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#31

Post by tazzy531 »

dgurney wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what this wi-fi mapping means? What are its implications?

Let's say you walk down the street and every block, you look at your iPhone and see what wireless base stations are available. Say on a certain corner, you see "Linksys", "Free_Porn", "Mom's Wifi". You write that down in your notebook.

You do this block by block for an entire city. So now you hold in your hands a notebook of all the WIFIs in the city. So let's say I blindfold you and throw you in a random street corner in the city. Using this notebook, your iPhone, and the wifi signals, you can easily figure out where you are in the city.

To be even more accurate, you may record the signal levels every 5 feet. So now from any given point, you can say "Linksys" has 5 bars, "Free_Porn" has 2 bars, and "Mom's Wifi" has 3 bars... I must be at the south east corner of 59th st.

So now you have a notebook of all these wifi signals. Your friend comes to visit your city and you give him a copy of your notebook. He can then use that to figure out where he is even if he can't get a GPS signal.

What's also nice about this is that it works indoors. Using a database of wifi signals, you can figure out that you're standing next to the kitchen in your 5th floor office.

That's basically what this wifi mapping is.

Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#32

Post by lotu »

gst wrote: post #23
dpark wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of Mac addresses for each vendor is very limited. Blacklisting a few Mac addresses would therefore blacklist lots of routers. MAC addresses should be globally unique. If your hardware vendor is shipping lots of routers with a shared MAC, they've messed up really badly.

They should, but in practice it seems they aren't. In the past (working at an ISP) I've seen collisions on Ethernet hardware (two Ethernet cards with the same MAC address). So if that even happens in a relatively small Ethernet, I assume that this will be fairly common if your address space includes each active WiFi router.

That has to mac address cloning where, the router clones a computer's Mac address; then that computer is given to someone else who connects it to the network.

Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#33

Post by rickmb »

airlocksoftware wrote: post #28
rickmb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Google is not going above and beyond normal privacy protections outside the US . Just because you can collect the data, doesn't mean you are allowed to. In countries with other definitions of privacy it can be considered a reasonable expectation the your AP's SSID is only visible to people within a small radius. The owners clearly didn't have the intention to have it collected by a major corporation, collated wit…

When it comes to privacy violations in the digital age, this is so far down the list of concerns that I don't understand why we're talking about it. Probably just because some politicians in (I believe it was) Germany misunderstood what it is and took legal action against Google. Facebook / other social networks, poorly secured databases, warrantless GPS tracking (in the U.S.), cell phone data being stored; these are…

Oh, I agree it's way down the list.

But this attitude is exactly what I mean: nobody misunderstood anything. Really. Just because people have different values and priorities doesn't mean that they are too stupid to understand the issues. It certainly doesn't mean their laws can simply be ignored if you do business in their country.

Anyway, I'm going to stop arguing that point, since apparently this place is turning into Reddit, and downvotes our now used just to bury other opinions.

Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#34

Post by antrix »

I would actually like the opposite feature from Google: let me update my location in your DB! The last time I moved house, it was months before before my phone started locating me correctly when at home. Of course, the hard problem in doing this is to figure out ways to avoid contamination of the DB.

Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#35

Post by lotu »

rickmb wrote: post #25
gregable wrote: post #10

Google is mapping publicly broadcast wifi access points to provide location services to augment GPS (faster locks for example) or when GPS is unavailable due to location or device. It's a very useful service - if you use a smartphone with mapping software, you likely benefit from this on a daily basis without realizing it. Apple does the same thing, although they collect it from user's iphones and ipads: http://www.a…

No. Google is not going above and beyond normal privacy protections outside the US . Just because you can collect the data, doesn't mean you are allowed to. In countries with other definitions of privacy it can be considered a reasonable expectation the your AP's SSID is only visible to people within a small radius. The owners clearly didn't have the intention to have it collected by a major corporation, collated wit…

Personally I see this as being much less invasive then taking pictures of someone's house and posting the location of the picture. Which is pretty much Google Street View, are you opposed Street View as well?

Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#36

Post by tonfa »

lotu wrote: post #35
rickmb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Google is not going above and beyond normal privacy protections outside the US . Just because you can collect the data, doesn't mean you are allowed to. In countries with other definitions of privacy it can be considered a reasonable expectation the your AP's SSID is only visible to people within a small radius. The owners clearly didn't have the intention to have it collected by a major corporation, collated wit…

Personally I see this as being much less invasive then taking pictures of someone's house and posting the location of the picture. Which is pretty much Google Street View, are you opposed Street View as well?

Street View has been quite controversial in many European countries.

Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#38

Post by DanBC »

To all the people saying "Don't broadcast it if you don't want it collected" or "what's the problem" - there are two problems here.

i) Google has unfortunate previous form. They've collected information from unsecured wifi, including snippets of emails; lists of people suffering from certain medical conditions; passwords; etc.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11797907)

They've made a "mistake" once. People want to be sure they don't make the same mistake again. (Scare quotes around mistake because, really, that's a lot of data to be accidentally scraping.)

ii) EU tends to prefer "Opt In" over "Opt Out", and it needs to be an explicit opt in. That means the company has to tell you what they're gathering, and why, and give you the choice to agree. Sure, that makes it very hard for companies to gather information (such as this which is on the very lower end of the privacy scale) and do useful cool things with that data. Some people (and I'm one of them) welcome the clear bright line that explicit opt in would draw between ethical companies (like Google; they're not evil and this wifi data gathering doesn't come close to being evil) and unpleasant seedy dodgy companies, who wouldn't bother obeying EU best practice data laws.

Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#39

Post by TruthElixirX »

tonfa wrote: post #36
lotu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I see this as being much less invasive then taking pictures of someone's house and posting the location of the picture. Which is pretty much Google Street View, are you opposed Street View as well?

Street View has been quite controversial in many European countries.

Business has been quite controversial in many European countries.

Re: Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks

#40

Post by cpeterso »

I'm tinkering on a hobby project to create a crowdsourced, open-data replacement to Google's geolocation web service that could be used for open-source projects like freedesktop.org's Geoclue [1] that might be blocked by Google's terms of service.

Companies like Google and Skyhook have massive wardriving efforts. If Google gets legal challenges about data privacy, could individual wardrivers be exposed to the same legal challenges if they published people's Wi-Fi data publicly? This would put a damper on my hobby project..

WiGLE.net is a similar crowdsourced, wardriving project. They've collected 48M Wi-Fi networks over 10 years from wardriving hobbyists, BUT they refuse to make their data available for download or create a public web API. They force people to use a crappy Java client and undocumented network protocol to access their server. Plus, they resell their users' crowdsource wardriving data to undisclosed buyers!

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GeoClue

[2] http://wigle.net/gps/gps/main/stats/

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