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Comment by flipperypokery | Hacker News Reader

Most people really have 10 different WiFi networks? I have two. Home and work. Who has 10?

Apple solved this by supporting local backups. My phone backs up to my computer. When I restore to a new device, the backup goes with it.

When I set up a completely new device -- which happens only once every couple of years -- I set up WiFi again. I've never, ever, ever thought "oh wow, setting up WiFi is just So Hard! I wish Apple would store my private WiFI password on their servers by default without telling me first!".

iCloud backup does store your data on Apple's servers, but it's opt-in, and it makes it quite clear what will be stored.

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>Most people really have 10 different WiFi networks? I have two. Home and work. Who has 10?

Home, work, the office where I do side work, my in-law's house at the beach, my parent's house in another state, multiple friend's houses that I frequent, my doctor's office, local restaurants, etc. Some of these places are cell signal dead zones and the only way to get a signal is to connect to WiFi. Plus WiFi is faster, more stable and doesn't cut into my limited cell data plan.

- Home - Brother's house - Other brother's house - Sister's house - Brother-in-law's house - Work #1 - Work #2 - Cafe #1 - Cafe #2 - Cafe #3 - School

And these are just the ones that I remember.

If you're in the habit of connecting wifi at cafes/bars etc. you can easily run past 10 (wow - just checked the list on my 18 month old laptop, it's currently 110 networks).

Though not all of the bar/cafe networks are passworded, likely.

This is also opt in, as part of the first boot process. It also makes it very clear what will be stored. The difference is that this is free.

Crucially (at least on my device,) there's no granularity to this opt in - I cannot choose to backup my application data but not my WiFi passwords. Now my options are to either accept Google's storage of my network passwords or set up and maintain my own backup system.

That assumes your application data is less important than your WiFi passwords. I don't think a distinction at that level is useful. To be useful, it would have to be per application. I don't care if some game status is synced, but I surely care if my email credentials are (although caring may just means I'm aware, it doesn't necessarily mean I would change it).

Do they mention that it will be unencrypted? I don't remember that, and I think I would have remembered that.

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