Google gives and Google receives. Although every day we use a lot of services from the technology giant, they also often use our data to improve their service offerings. Google collects some data about your WiFi network , but it also gives you the ability to prevent it… if you know how.
Google Maps is an amazing and often indispensable service for creating routes to all kinds of destinations, and a big part of its success comes from how good it is at figuring out where you are. And the reason it’s so good is, like a lot of things Google does, lots of data.
How Google collects data
Maps not only uses GPS to find, but also a huge database of home and business Wi-Fi networks that the company has mapped over the years through crowdsourcing and Street View cars.
Car Google Maps Street View
For years, Google Street View vehicles have been collecting data about Wi-Fi wireless networks in their path. This data is used so that other WiFi device users can geolocate your position. The mobile device sends Google the MAC addresses of the access points within its reach and Google returns the coordinates where the Google cars detected them.
Change the SSID of your WiFi
Some users do not feel comfortable thinking that the company has the geolocation and MAC of their WiFi point stored in its database. If you don’t want your hotspot’s MAC to be in Google’s logs, you can always make yourself unindexed in the system . The trick is an old one, dating back to 2011, when Google was forced to create an opt-out solution after data collection issues in the European Union related to Street View’s arrival in Germany.
Google has created a system to mark the WiFi that do not want to be cached. To do this, you simply have to modify the SSID, or network name, and add “_nomap” somewhere. In this way, Google’s tracking services will understand that your SSID does not want to be included in their logs.
SSID untraceable
When a Street View car passes by on the street and receives a signal from our network, it will ignore it and therefore not add it to the geolocation database. And if it already exists, it will delete it .
It should be noted that this only applies to Google itself. For example, Microsoft has a different command and you should use the “_optout” ending. If you want complete anonymity from two of the world’s leading tech companies, you should create an SSID like “1234_nomap_optout” to opt out of both services .
