How to keep your Wi-Fi location out of Google

How to keep your Wi-Fi location out of Google.

-- Tom

 

I actually think this deserves a separate topic. The other one was talking about public wireless networks and this is really unrelated.

Anyways, this is kinda like saying "Blue house at abd west street 10005."

I think it's a pretty neat feature. And your Wifi SSID is of course broadcasted and I don't see how this could possibly be a privacy violation unless I'm missing something?

 

What if somebody was collecting information on what cars are in your driveway? And then got a little closer and looked in the windows of the cars and inventoried the contents. I mean your car is just sitting out, not in the garage.

Maybe they want to know what kids are around your house, their ages, blondes or brunettes, playground equipment or none?

No, you can't extrapolate out the real world exactly to the tech world, but you can enough to know that collecting information per the article is just wrong.

Of course, you don't seem to have any problems with any of these privacy issues - but it sure doesn't keep you from hanging out and posting in this section.

 

This is interesting. There was a thread a few months ago that had a link from Mozilla that would use your browser and router to show your location. It could do this while connected to both a VPN and with Tor. And you could do it with the Tor browser bundle until they patched it.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=268494

I think they have been working on ways to bypass VPN's and Tor. If Firefox can politely do this with your permission, then can other types of software like Skype do this without your knowledge? And is Microsoft installing this capability now on all computers? I saw a thread in a message board a few weeks ago about the pre-installed software for lojack.....in the bios. It can't be removed. This guy said that he discovered it one day when his firewall showed it phoning home. And he had not subscribed to it.

 

It's not exactly looking into your house, it's finding where networks are. Your SSID has nothing to do with you unless you make it your name or something.

If someone says "Linksys10 is on Broadway" I'm not gonna be like "Oh hey jeff is on broadware." I can't use that information maliciously in any way because anyone could do the same thing and if there were malicious applications to connecting to a network we'd all be screwed.

 

Why? Because it's a major company doing it? War driving has been around since at least 2004/2005. If you use WiFi this info is there no matter what. Even if you turn broadcasting off (AKA invisable AP) the BSSID (MAC Address) is still there and can still be mapped using any number of tools to your LAT and Long. There is nothing illegal about me taking packets out of the air that are just there. If there was than scanning wifi would be illegal (it's the same info).

 

Yes, because a major company is doing it and using it, in whatever small way, to make profits. Period. It's not in a public space. The air? So are radio and TV signals and we can't snatch them for our own purposes and resell them just because they're there.

 

I'm with LockBox on this one.