Subject: Google's use of your SSID is totally legitimate.
Predictably, the usual gang of privacy whiners are complaining that it needs to be opt-in, not opt-out, or that Google shouldn't be using WiFi SSID's as geolocation data in the first place. (For those of you not aware ... when the Google Street View car drives around taking pictures of the streets and surroundings, it logs any nearby WiFi SSID's it finds. This information can then be used to grab a "coarse" location and/or to speed up the initialization of a GPS session.)
What the critics are conveniently forgetting, though, is that when you operate an access point in your home or business, you are voluntarily BROADCASTING your network's name to anyone within range. It is the same as if you switched on an AM or FM radio transmitter in your home or business and repeatedly spoke into the microphone: "My network is named kitty-net ... my network is named kitty-net ... my network is named kitty-net ..."
It seems patently obvious that if you don't want the world to know something, you shouldn't be broadcasting it on the open airwaves. Google is doing nothing wrong here.
Subject: Re: Google's use of your SSID is totally legitimate.
As a passionate privacy whiner, I can only say that your example is kind of exaggerated. As a wifi user, you want to use Wifi in your own appartment or house. Unfortunately, you can not prevent it from penetrating your walls. To exaggerate another stupid example, if you talk to somebody about your recent cancer/abortion/nervous brakedown sitting in your garden or on your balcony, you wouldnt want people to tape that with professional long range equipment while they drive by your house. You also don't want them to broadcast it on youtube with geotags included and a link to google maps. You also don't want everyone who googles about cancer/abortions/nervous brakedowns to be directed to your video manifest.
The solution is easy: Don't talk to anybody while sitting in your garden or balcony! Since you sit in the open world, you agree that everyone can tape it and use that material for what he wants. By sitting in the outside, you give consent to people recording everything while driving by your house. The question is: Does it stop here? Or do you need to insulate your walls completely so that no noise leaves your private space? Is it only then that you can really call it private?
If people are that concerned about what traffic is broadcast outside their walls, you can pick up a spool of CAT-5E for very little.
Yes, you can stop broadcasting the SSID. But the humanreadable name of your network is not the only thing you are sending out and google admitted to have, by total accident, scanned the content of packages of unencrypted wifi networks. And it is of course much more convenient to have the name broadcasted. This leads to another example:
For convenience reasons, most people have their name attached to their home, either on the mailbox or the doorbell or whatever is the tradition. This is a publically broadcasted information as well, it would be a little more troublesome for google to scan these, but they could. Then we'd have the same discussion again, since lots of people wouldn't want their names on google maps, I guess. What then? Should we change our signs to say "John Doe_nomap"? Of course you can turn this broadcasting off, but...
Oh and if the "Microsoft van" came around my neighborhood I would probably shoot out its tires ... not because of privacy issues but because they're Microsoft. :)
The concern is actually not just the wifi thing, it is that google has so much info about every one of us. If they one day connect the dots, they for sure will know more about us then we do.
Think about it, they got your email, they are in your phone, they know what you search for, what websites you visit, how long you stay there, where you shop, what you buy or sell.
Where you live, what you drive, who your friends are, ... there is just no end to this list.
I don't think a single company should have so much info about so many people.
I used to fight, Microsoft since the days of Netcape but compared to Google, Microsoft is nothing
Right now we have to fight against Facebook, not Google. Facebook has all of that information too (whether you're a member or not) and they are absolutely using it in disreputable ways, RIGHT NOW. Google merely has the capacity to do so.
Google is Santa Claus.
They know when you've been sleeping, they know when you're awake, they know when you've been bad or good...
Mon Dec 19 2011 05:26:05 PM EST from IGnatius T FoobarWhile I understand what you're getting at, I think your ire is misdirected.
Right now we have to fight against Facebook, not Google. Facebook has all of that information too (whether you're a member or not) and they are absolutely using it in disreputable ways, RIGHT NOW. Google merely has the capacity to do so.
I don't think RoboTamer is mis-directed. Buying up dark fiber that has been mis-placed is a bad thing, but it might be misdirected as an "evil thing".
There are a number of large companies gobbling dark fiber, ax....I could be naive here, but I'm not sure I see the evil in it. Where do you see it going?
Google's need for dark fiber is fairly obvious. They operate data centers all over the world, and those data centers need to be linked together. The more interconnect capacity they can operate themselves, the less they have to buy from others.
And as with any major Internet player, it's in nearly everyone's best interest to establish settlement-free peering with other network operators. You want to do that as much as possible and as widely as possible in order to keep your transit costs down. Google might even have a large enough footprint to employ "cold potato routing" if they believe it will improve the performance of their online services.
Next feature will be to add the correct faces/pictures of people you
know to your addressbook via face recognition
they[ve done this ...
If so, there's a zillions places in this world called "LINKSYS"
Of what value is that?
And again I don't see anything unethical about doing this.