This means that I will never allow a phone with a proprietary system into my WIFI.
Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
51–60 of 312 posts
Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#52The author is worried about WiFi passwords? If you trust that your WiFi is secure in general, you're in trouble. WPS is horribly insecure, for example, and that's what most home users use. Most user-chosen passwords are incredibly easy to guess for another. The better thing to do is to assume that your network traffic is always under surveillance (since the NSA is tapping Tier1 network providers), and to encrypt everything, or use network protocols which encrypt everything.
The only thing WiFi passwords are good for is to prevent your neighbors from using your network and using up all of your bandwidth (which would slow down your network access) and preventing drive-by spammers/hackers from doing things which you might then get blamed for.
Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#53This very same point could be made against Apple, for instance, but there hasn't been a single comment to that effect in any discussion of this article. I wonder if all of this recent Google-bashing is really just a symptom of something larger. People are suddenly waking up to the obvious-in-hindsight realization that simply giving their data to a third party involves a certain amount of trust. The reason people don'…
> This very same point could be made against Apple, for instance, but there hasn't been a single comment to that effect in any discussion of this article.
See a couple of months ago (the context is iMessages but the level of implicit trust is the same): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5943778
Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#54Are wifi passwords considered a security issue? I treat it the same way as a flimsy lock on a garden shed - I'd prefer both the shed and wifi to be open, but there's a formal "lock" to keep out teenage pranksters and drunks.
Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#55Or, in other words, Google remembers the things that we agree to have it remember.
Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#56Google also knows all the secrets of General David Petraeus, or anyone else that uses Gmail. And everything you've (secretly) searched for. Google's business model is based on aggregating that information and gaining value out of the data, mostly in the form of advertising. As soon as it lets a major secret out, even just once, it's game over, and no-one will ever trust a secret to Google again. This is why they publ…
>Google's business model is based on aggregating that information and gaining value out of the data, mostly in the form of advertising. As soon as it lets a major secret out, even just once, it's game over, and no-one will ever trust a secret to Google again.
Really? Because from what I've seen, the general public (including companies) would just continue using it without caring.
Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#57Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#58For convenience, most people won't opt out of it. Most people won't bother at all. Google employees(or even NSA if you don't do anything illegal) coming to your home/office to use your WiFi is a joke! Only the paranoid ones are perturbed by these kinds of revelations, and they are ready to face the inconvenience caused. I didn't use last pass until recently when keeping a difficult password on every site became a maj…
who says they need to use wifi. i expect a significant proportion of those passwords are shared with other systems, or may allow access to other corporate services - most likely VPN.
Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#59What's wrong in it.It's not a bank account rite.
It could be like leaving your bank account password in the open.
Your bank account password could be sniffed probably very easily by someone who is connected to your network. Now imagine somebody exposes some way to get the password of your home network from the google servers.
Re: Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world
#60Google is going to have thousands of different passwords mapped to the SSID "linksys."
I think the MAC Address of the router is known too, so there's no duplicates.
I have to wonder whether the MACs are "globally" unique - what's stopping an OEM using the same MAC? Also, I've seen router firmware features that will autogenerate a MAC for a guest network.