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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.

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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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