Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

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> The only way I can think of to prevent this is to build a faraday cage with a wired vpn router and your phone inside.

Another option is to not be running an operating system that betrays your interests. Google can only determine your location using nearby wifi networks if that list of nearby wifi networks has been given to Google through Android/Play backdoors. In fact most privacy issues with phones boil down to running a malevolent OS - protecting against malicious application code is still a difficult problem, but it is at least tractable if you can trust the system code.

(Personally I think the functionality of the OP should be included by default as part of the OS permission system, and configurable on a per-application basis)

At one point in time the Google street view vehicles were logging wifi position data as well. I don’t know if they still do it, though.

Sure, that's a related but different problem - cataloging the location of wifi APs versus inferring your personal location based on what APs your phone can see.

Running user-representing software on your phone doesn't fix all problems everywhere, it just gives you a platform with which you can address them to the fullest extent possible.

Fair, I took your original comment to mean that Google was mapping WiFI AP locations using people's phones (which could still be true). However, after re-reading it I see you meant that Google is pin-pointing your own location based on which AP's are visible.

Ah. Yes, that is what I meant.

I would think they are certainly using phones to collect Wifi AP locations. In fact if they've stopped doing so with the mapping cars, then it's probably because the phone backhaul is good enough.

The ways of preventing this are much less straightforward though. Stopping your phone collecting them will only remove some datapoints (perhaps significant for some people, but not for most). Disabling AP beacons or continually rotating ssid/bssid can mitigate it for your own APs, but at the cost of some UX.

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