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My Location the Next Google Privacy Controversy?
theodp writes "While Google boasts one of its Privacy Principles is making the collection of personal information transparent, even techies are left guessing about what's going on behind the scenes of certain products. The American Dictator points out that Google's Wi-Fi collection efforts don't stop with its Street View cars, offering up this explanation of Google's My Location: 'When you allow Google to "know your location," what you are really agreeing to is to send to Google's computers your Wi-Fi environment — not only the name of the Wi-Fi hotspot you are logged into, but also the names and signal strengths of every Wi-Fi hotspot around you. In other words, the same things that those Google Street View cars were sucking up as they drove by your house.' So, will changes in privacy attitude prompt changes in Latitude?"
This make me glad I never use he internet, ever.
This method of radio-location is not special or unusual in any way. If anything, it is rather common and not even innovative on google's part. Several firms have exited for _years_ which focus on location based services as determined by nearby hotspots. Also, Latitude is littered with warnings about the nature of the service, and the fact that your location information will be sent back to Google. Of course, this is even less interesting when you consider the fact that your cell phone carrier already knows all of this information all the time and always has, which nobody makes any fuss about whatsoever.
You mean that in order to use a service that uses your Wifi surroundings to determine your location, you have to send the service data about your Wifi surroundings? Holy shit!
Next, you'll tell me you have to send your private, personal *search terms* to Google to get search results - the horror!
I'm a government spy, you insensitive clods!
That makes it public. Google is merely asking you to forward some public information to them. You may, if you wish, decline.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think many of the people screaming loudest about the street view data collection never understood that Google was intentionally and unapologetically logging the SSIDs.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
People go to great pains to send a hundred mW throughout the air as far as it'll go, and are surprised when it does just that?
I'm on a volunteer ambulance squad; being a nerd I made a python script to scrape our crappy eDispatch provider's website for our dispatches and assemble them on a nice website. There was a big fight over password protecting this... despite the fact that we are going to great pains and expense to pump the very same information at about 50W. I ended up throwing a trivial password on it, until everybody forgot.
Point is, people don't seem to understand the 'broad' part of 'broadcast', and get annoyed that they don't have full control of the signals they emanate past their walls.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I completely agree, it's surprising how many people think that when they send something to EVERYONE, that they have no ability to tell EVERYONE that "that was a secret. don't tell anybody, K?"
The recent privacy controversy was never about Google detecting and recording the names, unique IDs, and signal strength of local WiFi hotspots -- It was about Google mistakenly recording traffic, including unencrypted information that anyone could easily utilise.
In addition to that, there are only four ways to locate someone connected to the Internet:
- GeoIP which can perhaps pin you down to a city, perhaps even a town,
- WiFi triangulation which can pin you down to within a few metres
- Latency triangulation which is frankly uncompletely unworkable on something as complex as the internet
- IP->Postal Address Mapping (Read: ISP's database)
Obviously only two of these are workable for someone like Google and GoeIP is completely inaccurate. No ISP is going to give Google access to their address database.
How many people have scanners these days?
How many people have the Internet?
Now do you understand why there might be concern about putting the dispatches in a central location on the Internet?
There are a lot of idiots out there, and they can really waste your time. That really is the biggest pitfall of open information, imo.
> ...I am concerned about them capturing packet data.
Then don't broadcast it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If you have Google Maps on your phone (iPhone excluded), and you have wifi enabled, it will give you your 'wifi location'. That means google already knows about where the wif access points are?
Actually iPhone OS devices use wifi location too and have for quite some time. If your iPhone can't get a GPS fix, or if you have an original GPS-less iPhone, or if you have an iPod or wifi iPad, it will fall back on cell towers or wifi to determine your location. This functionality is built into the OS and works with any app that uses the location APIs.
You can't specifically enable/disable wifi location on iPhone, it's just another tool that may be used if location services are enabled but GPS is not available.
You've said that half a dozen times or so.
There really is a fundamental difference between traditional surveillance and cheap, mass technological data collection (At a minimum, cost!). It makes sense to acknowledge that difference in our laws, rather that just spitting on people when they don't understand how pervasive the monitoring is, or what the full implications of their actions may be.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
And I don't understand why Google wants that information in the first place.
Maybe they think its hilarious to run "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM WIFI_GEOLOCATION_TABLE WHERE SSID='Linksys'"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I'm in the US, but today Google shows my location as a town in Norway. Last week it said I was in Malaysia. Every so often it puts me in my actual office location. I'm guessing my corporate proxy has something to do with the confusion, since I'm not using wifi on my laptop.
Yeah, IP-based location is very poor, often choosing the wrong city. Wifi can vary from bad to good, but it's often reasonably accurate (e.g. to a few blocks).
I once had wifi location tell me that I was hundreds of miles away - I was at an exhibition, and I assume that the wifi access points were used at different exhibition and conference halls throughout the country.
I guess I don't mean that iPhone doesn't have wifi location - it's the provider of that information. Last I checked it was Skyhook who provided the data, not Google. Maybe the iPhone collects and aggregates the information in a similar fashion, but they don't share data back and forth. My phone knew where my old apartment was by wifi, but my iPod touch had no clue. In fact, my phone (WinMo) knew where I was everywhere in the city without ever turning on GPS, but, once again, my iPod had no idea.
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
"I don't understand how Google tracking wifi networks is bad for me."
They, or someone with access to their data, might abuse the information. If Google were a small, local company, doing this sort of thing for a single locale, it would not be so terrible -- but they are a huge, international operation, tying information together from all over the world, and using that information to determine more details about a person than that person agreed to reveal. There is a very high potential for abuse, and this is one of those situations where once the abuse starts, it will already be too late.
Palm trees and 8
I completely agree, it's surprising how many people think that when they send something to EVERYONE, that they have no ability to tell EVERYONE that "that was a secret. don't tell anybody, K?"
Interestingly, that seems to be DirecTV's business model.