
Google is mapping your wi-fi access point and the opt-out options stinks - primesuspect
http://tech.icrontic.com/article/google-is-mapping-your-wi-fi-access-point-and-the-opt-out-options-stinks/
======
gregable
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.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27Apple-Q-A-on-
Locat...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/04/27Apple-Q-A-on-Location-
Data.html)

One of the original companies that did this was skyhook and they also use
vehicles driving around: <http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/>

Google is actually going above and beyond normal industry privacy protections
by offering a reasonably simple opt-out. They are recommending that others in
the industry do the same. Calling instead for an opt-in system effectively
destroys this whole service's effectiveness for everyone.

~~~
dotBen
You are absolutely right, an opt-in system would destroy the whole location-
by-wifi-ssid service for everyone.

...but that doesn't create leverage or a good reason for having such a poor
and inelegant opt-out. This is an "ends justifies the means" argument, which
is in itself Machiavellian.

From a different perspective, there are other ways Google could handle an opt-
out list - such as letting people add their SSID/Mac Address to a central opt-
out registry they maintain.

This would be trivial to implement, but I would suggest that Google have
intentionally created a high-friction solution of "-nomap" to your SSID simply
to make it as difficult and unpalatable as possible. And that really stinks.

~~~
gst
There are two problems with the MAC approach:

1) The amount of Mac addresses for each vendor is very limited. Blacklisting a
few Mac addresses would therefore blacklist lots of routers. Combining this
with the SSID doesn't really help that much, as many users will stick to the
default SSID. (And if you require that users change their SSID to a non-
default one you can as well require that they just add a given suffix).

2) In the EU there have not only been complaints about Google offering the
data, but also about Google processing the data. So I guess they want to make
sure that their streetview cars that log this data don't log opt-opt routers
at all. It's simple to do if the SSID has such a suffix. It'd be much harder
if the software system in the card would need to query a central opt-out
database before processing a router's data.

~~~
dpark
> _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.

~~~
gst
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.

~~~
lotu
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.

------
notatoad
SSIDs are a signal you broadcast to identify yourself. if you don't want
people receiving that signal, stop broadcasting it. if i stand on my roof and
shout at the top of my lungs "HEY LOOK AT ME", i can't then expect people not
to look at me. broadcasting your SSID is essentially the same thing, and you
can't blame google for the fact that your router does this. pretty much any
router will allow you to turn off SSID broadcast.

~~~
yellowbkpk
You don't have to broadcast an SSID (the human-readible name for the access
point) for Google's system to pick it up. I'm pretty sure (based on some
packet sniffing I've done on the Android Google Maps app suite) that Google's
grabbing the BSSID, the MAC-address-like thing that uniquely identifies a Wifi
wireless device.

Even if you turn off SSID broadcast, your router will still send out
broadcasts of some sort.

~~~
l_subbu
The arguments for and against could be evaluated better if someone can explain
how one can misuse this service.

What ever it is that google is noting down about the broadcasting station and
tagging it with its lat-long, if it also appears in some form in the packets
that originate from a host behind this station, then some one can infer the
geographic location of this traffic source. Is that the case here?

Unless that's the case, is there any other way someone can misuse this? The
only other exploitation I see is tracking a router from it's point of sale to
it's point of deployment and finding out the location of the buyer. Where else
does the BSSID of the station appear other than within it's geographic
neighborhood and the manufacturer's/retailer's database?

May be the database should not be indexed directly with this BSSID but a one-
way hash of (BSSID, something-about-the-neighborhood) - to make sure no one
can do an arbitrary lookup but will already need to be in the neighborhood of
the station to make a successful query. At least it will raise the bar.

I in fact would like to use this in my app! Continuous location tracking using
GPS drains out the battery so fast that it is not even an option for me. The
significant location change accuracy is not good enough for what I'm doing.
I'm trying to figure out how to use this service. Does any one know?

------
wx77
Does anyone have a reason for why this wifi mapping invades my privacy?

I just can't see what makes it so wrong, I mean I am not ecstatic about my
router mac and general area being tied together but is it easy for someone to
find where I am based on what wifi I am connected to through a browser?

The only time I see it being a problem is if you have malware and they are
able to target you by location but depending on what malware you are infected
with it might be just as easy for the malware users to look somewhere else for
location.

Maybe I am just being dense.

~~~
LogicX
There was a vulnerability in dd-wrt a few months back, allowing anyone to get
your router's mac addy -- then presumably they can lookup your MAC using a
service such as this or skyhook to get your EXACT location (not just an IP
address approximation) Here's the HN coverage of that:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2044371>

------
mmaunder
If you configure your AP to broadcast your SSID, you are advertising yourself
to the rest of the world and you should expect the rest of the world,
including Google, to catalog your existence.

If you disable your AP's SSID broadcast, then Google should not catalog your
AP and if they do it by sniffing packets then I would say that's unethical.

But complaining about Google with SSID broadcast enabled is like hanging out
in a singles bar after taking a vow of celibacy.

------
turing
At least Google offers an opt-out option. As far as I know neither Apple nor
Skyhook do.

------
sneak
Opting out is simple: stop voluntarily broadcasting unique identifiers out
unencrypted on the public airwaves.

This is like complaining that your neighbors keep posting naked pictures of
you on the Internet because you like to sunbathe nude on your front lawn.

If you transmit the rays, other people can record them. It's as simple as
that.

See also: cordless phones, DECT, FRS, street view, pre-digital unencrypted
800MHz cellular

------
kalleboo
The person who wrote the article this link goes to doesn't seem to understand
what Google's Wifi AP database is for. He seems to think it's going to be some
searchable database instead of just used for device positioning. It would have
been better to just post the link to the Google blog post instead of this
misinformed blog.

~~~
throwaway64
To be useful for device positioning, doesnt it by definition, have to be
searchable?

~~~
cheald
Not necessarily directly. It could work by saying "Here's a list of SSIDs I
can see", to which the server responds "You're probably at [<lat, long,
confidence>, <lat, long, confidence>, ...]".

Under such a system, you'd have to know the SSID ahead of time, which probably
means you're in close proximity to it already.

------
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.

~~~
lotu
The collection of data was a result of Google storing the whole packet which
was broadcast unencrypted for anyone to see. To me this is similar to not
installing curtains in your house and then getting upset about people taking
naked pictures of you. If privacy is important to then _you_ have to take the
first steps to protect it. It is unreasonable to put the burden of protecting
your privacy entirely on everyone but you. If you don't bother to do something
simple like encrypt your wifi I have to assume that means you don't care if it
public. (I personally leave my wifi unencrypted for this exact reason.) As for
cost and required knowledge installing curtains is probably trickier and more
expensive then having the Geek Squad setup encrypted wifi.

~~~
DanBC
People are stupid, but exploiting that stupidity is still evil. (I'm lousy at
analogy, but here's an attempt: People dis-enrobing with no curtains are
stupid, but it's the pervs who post pictures to the Internet; polite people
glance and walk on.)

Even Google disagrees with you.

([http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/15/google-
admi...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/15/google-admits-
storing-private-data))

> _"As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View
> cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to
> make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and
> are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how
> to quickly dispose of it."_

Accessing a person's unencrypted wifi without their permission is, in England,
a criminal offence and that's been tested by the courts.

(<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4721723.stm>)

Having said all that, this German case says that people shouldn't be stupid
and they are responsible for the security of their networks:

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10116606>)

------
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/>

------
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.

------
rickmb
Here's a little update: the majority of Dutch parliament rejects Google's
proposal.
[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nu.nl%2Finternet%2F2669068%2Fkamer-
ontevreden-met-tegemoetkoming-google.html)

Right or wrong, this tends to happen if you try to arrogantly dictate instead
of negotiate. It turns public opinion against you and it pisses politicians
off, even business-friendly conservatives.

------
eps
Would turning off the beacon hide the AP from Google mapping? Are there any
details how they detect APs exactly?

------
orijing
Coming up next: Hyper-local ad targeting that knows to-the-block your
position. Current IP-address based targeting is not very accurate, but knowing
where you are exactly by your router opens up another frontier of monetization
potential.

~~~
cheald
Which...may not be a bad thing. If I'm gonna see ads, I'd rather see ads that
are relevant to me. If I'm gonna sell ads, I'd rather sell them to people who
are most likely to find them useful/actionable.

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

~~~
tazzy531
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.

------
suivix
It'll probably make apps better if they know where every SSID is. I don't see
this as a bad thing, although it is a minor privacy intrusion.

------
rickmb
Oh god, here we go again. Why doesn't Google (or a large portion of HN for
that matter) ever learn? Privacy has a different meaning outside the US, and
in many places, especially Europe, is strongly protected.

Just because the information is _public_ doesn't mean you have the right to
collect it and use it any way you see fit, and it certainly doesn't mean it
isn't in invasion of privacy.

Given the issues in the past, this is just a big fuck you to Europe (and
clearly deliberate, since it is explicitly cross posted in their European
Public Policy Blog).

You can disagree with values and laws in other countries, but you don't just
piss all over them like that and expect to still be able to do business there
unhindered unless you have a serious attitude problem. Google is rapidly
becoming the corporate embodiment of the "Ugly American".

~~~
anigbrowl
Speaking as a European (albeit living in the US) this doesn't offend me at
all. If you're broadcasting an AP, then it's like walking past your house and
noticing what color it's painted. Don't want to broadcast, then plug in a
wire. It's not like they're monitoring your traffic.

When I was growing up, every household with a telephone got a book that had
everyone's name _and_ home address in it. That too was an opt-out system and
that approach worked pretty well.

~~~
rickmb
Noticing something as you walk by and a corporate giant collecting, collating
and using that information for something the _owner_ never intended it for are
two wildly different things. Context is everything.

The phonebook was a well known consequence of having a phone, dating back to
the days when the phone companies were state owned public services. These days
it would be utterly unacceptable if for instance internet access providers
would do the same thing. Again, context is everything.

And just to make it clear: as a European, you are not offended by an American
company that thinks it has the right to ignore local laws and sensitivities?

~~~
anigbrowl
No, I don't think they are ignoring laws and I don't share your sensitivities.
Of course, that has something to do with my decision to live in the US rather
than Europe, but OTOH I make a frequent habit of saying that the US could be
more like the EU in some ways, not least having a constitutional right to
privacy. But although I am an enthusiastic privacy advocate, the fact is that
if you're broadcasting a wifi AP then anyone going past with a wifi device can
observe the fact. Choosing to collect and collate that information is no
different from a glazier travelling through a neighborhood estimating the size
of the window market.

