Analysts lambast Google's location privacy proposals

Google's Wi-Fi opt-out scheme would create turmoil for IT departments, caution analysts

Google's plans to introduce stronger privacy safeguard for its location services have been lambasted for the naïve assumption that businesses and individuals would not object to the site of their Wi-Fi networks being recorded.

Google today published more details about its proposals for safeguarding Wi-Fi owners' privacy, outlining a plan to let the owners opt out of having the location of their wireless networks recorded.

But the proposals are likely to dismay IT chiefs, who may have sound business reasons for not wanting third parties to track the whereabouts of wireless networks they operate, said Tony Lock, an analyst with research firm Freeform Dynamics.

Under Google's proposals, anyone that runs a wireless access point would be able to opt out of having its location recorded by the search giant by changing the name of the network – its SSID – to end with the phrase “_nomap”.

“As we explored different approaches for [setting up] opt-out access points from the Google Location Server, we found that a method based on wireless network names provides the right balance of simplicity as well as protection against abuse,” wrote Google's global privacy council, Peter Fleisher, in a company blog post.

However, such an approach would create a huge workload for any company that wished to opt out, argued Lock, as every user's sign-on details would need to be amended to include the new SSID.

“It should be up to the user to opt in to these schemes, not opt out,” said Lock. “Google needs to recognise that just because data is available it does not mean people want it to be recorded.”

Google has created detailed maps of SSID positions to use for some of its location services. This provides it with a means of determining a smartphone users' whereabouts, by knowing which network access points are nearby. This can be used as an alternative to GPS, which doesn't always work well indoors and requires less battery power.

But Google's attempts to map SSID locations has attracted the ire of European privacy regulators, not least because the vehicles it used to create the maps also recorded some of the traffic crossing the networks it was mapping.

The proposed opt-out mechanism was unlikely to mollify those European regulators, suggested Lock. “The proposals are naïve in the extreme,” he added.