Re: Does anyone respect a Wi-Fi Access Point SSID with _optout_ or _nomap anymore?

On Sat, 20 Nov 2021 20:25:29 -0000 (UTC), soyon <[email protected]>
wrote:

>If you are broadcasting your SSID, can I ask you a question?
>Do you use the _optout_ and/or the _nomap on your own router's SSID?

My home router's SSID is my address.  It makes finding sources of
interference much easier.  Even without broadcasting my SSID, sniffing
the traffic can identify my wireless router by MAC address.  I don't
care of Google finds my house by my router location.  For my
customers, I ask for their preference and explain the privacy issues.
It usually ends up being their last name so that visitors can easily
find the correct SSID to use.

I used to be a computer consultant and would occasionally run into
_nomap appended SSID's.  I've never seen _optout.  Maybe 5 routers out
of several hundred.  I just greped some 2 year old sniffer logs, which
contain about 5,000 unique SSID's, and found 15 _nomap and 0 _optout
entries.  Only one of my customers has ever asked to have _nomap
added.  He read some article on security which recommended it.  I
talked him out of it.

NOMAP is slang of a pedophile.  In the three situations where the
router SSID ended in _NOMAP, one of my tasks was to change it so
something less offensive.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/NOMAP>
Whether this has anything to do with it not being used is unknown.

Owners of home routers usually do not have a problem with an SSID
ending in _optout or _nomap.  However, house guests and visitors seem
to have some difficulty dealing with the concept and would invariably
ask why it's there.  I've received a few questions asking if it could
be safely removed.  For a time, there was at least one local
consultant or installer who was appending _nomap to his customers
routers.  That was just after the feature was announced by Google in
about 2011.  I saw such SSID's quite frequently.  Then, about 4 years
later, they slowly started to disappear.  I could drive around town
today, and probably would not find any.  My guess(tm) is the reason
they disappeared is the installer that was doing that went away or the
routers were replaced.

"Control access point inclusion in Google's Location services"
<https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632>

A friend is very much into the privacy, anonymous, hidden, etc thing.
Over the years, it's been rather entertaining to watch all the privacy
hacks and "solutions" he has tried.  My favorite was a program he
wrote that would change is SSID and MAC address every few minutes.  A
scan of available AP's resulted in hundreds of fake SSID's and took
several minutes to connect, even if the correct SSID/pass-phrase
combination had been saved.  Security by obscurity perhaps.  It lasted
a few days.  


-- 
Jeff Liebermann                 [email protected]
PO Box 272      http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272
Skype: JeffLiebermann      AE6KS    831-336-2558