Append "_nomap" to your AP's SSID to opt out of Google Location Services (2011)

Post by nieve » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 7:43 AM UTC

yohui wrote: post #37

_wmd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for that one small time in Europe when they "accidentally" captured live traffic en masse.. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/05/17/google-admits-s...

What's with the scare quotes? Are you suggesting it was not an accident?

You may have missed the bits that came out about the capture going on with the knowledge of some Google employees. Th e original developer has plenty of experience with wifi data capture and knew exactly what you could do with the data as well as that you didn't need full packet dumps to snag SSIDs.

"Google long maintained that the engineer was solely responsible for this aspect of the project, which resulted in official investigations, some still unresolved, in more than a dozen countries. But a complete version of the F.C.C.’s report, released by Google on Saturday, has cast doubt on that explanation, saying that the engineer informed at least one superior and that seven engineers who worked on the code were all in a position to know what was going on." - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/technology/engineer-in-goo...

Post by dspillett » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 11:08 AM UTC

r0h1n wrote: post #20

Once upon a time the default privacy model used to be "opt-in". Which then became "opt-out" thanks in large parts to Google. Of course it helped that very few "lay people" take active steps to opt-out. It appears "rename and opt-out" is the latest model. I'm guessing even fewer lay users will take this step. Technically this allows Google to claim it gives people an easy way to opt out, but in practice nothing much i…

> those who were worried about privacy were probably not broadcasting their SSID publicly to begin with

Though it seems unintuitive Not broadcasting your SSID is actually less secure than broadcasting it.

Those truly worried about privacy never use wireless transmission directly, instead using a VPN (only allowing the VPN wrapped traffic go out over the air) and set their own APs to block any traffic that isn't to/from the VPN end-point(s).

Re: Append "_nomap" to your AP's SSID to opt out of Google Location Services (2011)

Re: Append "_nomap" to your AP's SSID to opt out of Google Location Services (2011)