"why should I change my name, he's the one who sucks?!?"(Office Space)
Why are we celebrating having to manually change our device names so that we aren't involuntarily gobbled up for surveillance? It should of course be opt-in. Fuck clapping for this
But while things are this opt-out-of-surveillance way, I wanted to post this so people can 1) know the option to opt-out exists, and 2) do so. I did not know this was happening and so it is useful to me to figure out how to resist the surveillance, at least for a little while. It's not a perfect world, but this community's spirit is about helping us to fix it, even with imperfect solutions that we should not have to make in the first place. I am not posting this to give these big corps flowers, but to help the little clueless guy like myself who did not know this was going on.
Imo, both immediate and future solutions are needed. Immediate ones like what's proposed in the post (Iirc there's a saying for this, "live today so you can fight tomorrow"), and future ones like seeking awareness of people, consequences for the companies pushing these problems, and if needed, improvement on laws.
I would probably opt for lowering the broadcast power instead, so it's just physically not possible to see your network from the street.
It's kinder to your neighbours as well.
I really do get wanting to opt out for privacy reasons, but at the same time, it's a useful thing for getting a location fix much easier/quicker. Obviously the big players have been doing this for years, but Mozilla used to as well, and when they stopped it became much harder to find a good open source/free location service. Same idea applies to cell towers, it's much easier to get a GPS fix when you already roughly know where you are. I use NeoStumbler on long road trips to help map cell towers to beaconDB (they also honor _nomap, and don't update location for a year if you move your router so it doesn't track you).
can somebody explain how SSID are used for mapping? what if I change my SSID often, will that mess up google results?
There are probably millions of "Netgear" SSIDs across the globe so Google doesn't really use your network name to do the mapping. Every wifi radio also has a BSSID, which is the unique MAC address for your radio. This or the combination of both would be what they are using to do the lookup.
So adding the _nomap to your ssid is the only option you have to prevent your BSSID from being added to their database. If you don't trust Google to honor the _nomap you could regularly change your BSSID. Many consumer routers let you change your WAN MAC but almost none of them will let you change your BSSID.
State of affairs for technology seem bad? But what is being done to change it? And what could be done by you so it changes at least for yourself?
A community to talk about the reversal of enshittification, be it news, actions that could be done, etc.
A person that sees no solution has no reason to keep going.
Some communities related to the scope to check too: