The mapping is not done so people can find your WiFi and connect to it. It has nothing to do with whether your access point uses encryption or not. It's just a way to do triangulation using known anchor points.
Suppose there's 3 access point advertising their existence around you (most access points do by default). If you know their coordinates on earth and their relative signal strengths, you can pinpoint a pretty accurate position of yourself. Kinda like GPS.
Google screwed up by collecting more data than they should, and now they are doing a little dance to appease the lawyers.
The solution is indeed a joke, because there's no problem. It makes no sense to not want people to pinpoint an access point on a map, when it's actively advertising itself. The way I see it, there's no privacy breach whatsoever.
The real problem (Google collecting too much personal data) has already been fixed.
Suppose there's 3 access point advertising their existence around you (most access points do by default). If you know their coordinates on earth and their relative signal strengths, you can pinpoint a pretty accurate position of yourself. Kinda like GPS.
Google screwed up by collecting more data than they should, and now they are doing a little dance to appease the lawyers.
The solution is indeed a joke, because there's no problem. It makes no sense to not want people to pinpoint an access point on a map, when it's actively advertising itself. The way I see it, there's no privacy breach whatsoever.
The real problem (Google collecting too much personal data) has already been fixed.
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