The street address is officially registered, is attributed by the town and doesn’t belong to you. I don’t think you can find some more public than that.

Compare that to the name of your private router that happens to be broadcasted far outside your house for technical reasons.

I doubt you can claim "ownership" of text strings used for wifi and otherwise freely available. I suspect Google's lawyers would have stopped this feature from being implemented if there were even potential issues.

You are right in that there isn't an ownership angle to this. The same way if you call your cat "Murphy", you wouldn't get a claim on the name, nor should forbid people from memorizing that you call your cat that name.

To be honest I am not sure where I stand on the issue, but I sympathize on the uneasiness of a global corporation taking advantage of a situation in a way few people ever thought about. That's where I think the perception of the public/private status diverge for most people.

It is trivially easy to connect an SSID to an identity, as soon as someone runs any application on the network that has privileges to both an identity and the SSID.

>It is trivially easy to connect an SSID to an identity

As opposed to a street address? In most cases there's a 1 to 1 relationship between a house and a hotspot.

Yes, it's just key-value data and basically every mobile OS has APIs that will hand it to a developer on a silver platter. I'm sure that this data is already available from various data brokers, just as address data is.

But it's not a competition anyway. Address data being freely available doesn't make other privacy abuses any less bad.

> Address data being freely available doesn't make other privacy abuses any less bad.

If the mapping of SSIDs to GPS coordinates is a "privacy abuse", what does it say about mappings of house numbers to GPS coordinates? Should companies like google/tomtom be banned from collecting such mappings?

this is a bad analogy. A house number is assigned by a government in some form and looking up who lives at a certain address is not trivial and will certainly raise eyebrows. Workarounds exist such as election records however those were created during a time when google-level privacy invasion was not as widespread.

An SSID is created by a private individual for private use and its use as a tracking tool must be discouraged.

>A house number is assigned by a government in some form

Why is this relevant? SSNs are government assigned but they're private.

>looking up who lives at a certain address is not trivial and will certainly raise eyebrows

But we're not talking about address-to-person or ssid-to-person mappings here, we're talking about address-to-location or ssid-to-location mapping.

>An SSID is created by a private individual for private use and its use as a tracking tool must be discouraged.

What about other privately made identifying features? ie. "I'm in front of the ranch style house with blue walls and a tire swing out front".

I'm not saying that anyone should be banned from doing anything. I am just saying that the information is not hard to correlate.

People who are concerned about their address privacy will often put their home in the ownership of trust or a corporation. That data, despite being regularly collected, is exploitable, and is often exploited. I'm not saying this should be legally changed, but pointing out that it is reasonable to bring up the concern.

> I'm not saying that anyone should be banned from doing anything.

Your characterization of it as a "privacy abuse" suggests otherwise. Moreover, my argument is that most people wouldn't call a mapping of street numbers to gps coordinates a privacy abuse, so it would be absurd to call a mapping of BSSIDs to gps coordinates a privacy abuse as well since they're both pretty similar.

Data collection is not automatically abuse, but it can facilitate abuse, and some distributors of that data (i.e. data brokers) and often complacent in that abuse.

Abuse is all about what someone does with the data.

I probably would have been more clear if I had said "potential privacy abuses" above. Any time this data is given/sold to third parties without any legal framework for protecting it, it is ripe for potential abuse.

>Abuse is all about what someone does with the data.

Okay, what are some plausible privacy abuses that can come from this?

It’s easier with an address

Yes, and that's another legitimate privacy concern. It is not uncommon for that data to be abused. And many people who are concerned about their name being linked to their address choose to work around this by transferring ownership to a different legal entity.

Does it mean Google is allowed to create a list of all people with their addresses and use it for advertising?

I don't know if Google does it, but it happens all the time.

And how does one opt out of that?