My Location the Next Google Privacy Controversy? 167
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?"
Re:Not unusual (Score:4, Interesting)
just because SOME don't collect the data, doesn't mean ALL won't.
Re:Yay, Slashdot is reducing itself to sensational (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
It's astonishing how people don't understand radio (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not unusual (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That information is all being broadcast. (Score:0, Interesting)
Not quite. While the SSID's are public information, the signal strength relative to me isn't. That's something you have to be me to know or at least be standing next to me. I hardly call that public information.
Re:Not unusual (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google already does this - sort of (Score:4, Interesting)
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.