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Comment by client4 | Hacker News Reader

Actually yes! I found it surprising and thought it deserved a conversation. Thanks for posting the link in the other discussion. I've actually changed my SSID because of this ... though it may have the opposite effect of drawing more attention to my SSID because prettyflyforawifi_nomap doesn't have the same ring as the original.

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And my real issue with it is that I have to change my SSID to opt-out.

I have many, many devices using my WiFi, some of them (home made) IoT devices with custom firmware and the SSID/BSSID baked in to the firmware. Changing my SSID is a huge undertaking and I'm sure Google is aware of this.

I don't get to opt out, unless I want half of my home automation to stop working and potentially weeks of effort to get the rest of it back up and running.

I agree it's annoying the onus for opt-out is put onto the generally unaware public. I've been contemplating a project that would "poison the well" as it were. Users could submit a MAC address and SSID to a service allowing other users to broadcast this information to make SSID collection much less useful. The downside to this idea is that it would be easy-ish to filter out the noise if individuals had a constant SSID for their own use.

Perhaps the better way to handle it would have devices rotate SSID's and/or passwords and/or router MAC's on a regular basis. Like algorithmically have all devices compute the SSID on a daily basis (with a few hours dual-broadcasting SSID's to account for clock issues) based on a seed.

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