[wadkar]

I can’t make sense of this. Are you telling me that any Android user with “default” pixel setup will use my SSID for location tracking?

And that if my WiFi shouldn’t be part of Google’s (and Microsoft as well) data collection I need to suffix my SSID with _optout_nomap??

This has to be a joke. Any docs/refs/links?

[betterunix2]

Your neighbors are currently monitoring your wifi network. That is how wifi works -- we all monitor each other's transmissions to avoid interfering with each other's networks. Most wifi APs will also monitor the ISM bands to find the least-congested channel to use, and will typically do so continuously and change to a different channel as needed. You may also have noticed that when you connect to a new network you start with a list of nearby SSIDs that you can choose from -- do you think looking at that list is a violation of privacy?

Moreover, there are companies that operate large numbers of APs across a broad geographic region, and they may have a centralized system for managing those APs -- which means that they are collecting information about all nearby wifi stations (including client devices) across a broad region in a single place. Do you have a problem with that practice or view that as a violation of privacy?

Radio is not private (except, possibly, cellular services, which may be treated as phone services with legal restrictions on wiretapping), especially when you are talking about unlicensed operation.

[ratww]

Monitoring something in good faith to avoid interfering with it is completely different from performing a mass-gathering of potentially personal identifiable information in the form of MAC, SSID and geographical position and putting it in a database for making money.

What Google is doing is a cool hack and might be fully legit, but it's foolish to claim there's no potential privacy issues in it.

[kllrnohj]

All Apple devices do this by default as well, and they don't seem to publish an opt-out for it. Possibly they also follow the _nomap suffix as a few others do, but seems more likely they just don't let you opt-out at all.

> If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers (where supported by a device) in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056

[jkaplowitz]

Mozilla will also respect the Google opt-out suffix for their own WiFi data collection; Apple collects this data too but offers no published way to opt out.

[jfrunyon]

When a user's phone attempts to get a location fix, it will use the beacons which are publicly transmitted by Wifi networks around it (I assume it's the BSSID/MAC address, specifically) to reference against (or update) a Google database mapping those BSSID's to coordinates.

[mike-cardwell]

Yes. That is precisely what you're being told. The Google evidence is linked upthread. Although, I've just done a search and it looks like the Microsoft feature that required the "_optout" substring was removed at some point. I'm going to leave it in my SSID for posterity.