Re: Apple changed their documentation at my request but it proves they don't care about privacy

After having read the prior responses in this Jon/Carlos tangent... 

I apologize if I haven't explained the situation to the liking of people
who haven't clicked on the references, but I am happy that Jon and Carlos
(and Andy and Lawrence, all of whom I respect) are trying to understand.

I especially wish to thank Jon Ribbens and Carlos & any others who have
bothered to read the links provided, because they explain the issue well.

If people haven't read the references, then they're stuck in the stone age
of understanding, which, well, which I'm not the one to drag them out of.

I just don't have the skills to explain that an SSID is not a BSSID 
(as witnessed by those who claimed changing the SSID changes the BSSID).

These are basic networking concepts.

Regarding locations, I don't have the skills to explain what a set of GPS
coordinates means, if people claim it's "just a map". I don't even know
_how_ to _begin_ to explain that your home address is NOT "just a map".

I don't even know how to explain to people who claim that the router never
travels as their belief system is so absurd as to warn me that if they
don't understand that people take their routers with them when they move,
then that kind of person will never be able to understand, well, anything.

I apologize that I don't have the skills set to bring folks out of the
stone age, when they claim a home address is "just a location on a map".

People who make those claims will never be able to comprehend why it is so
trivial for Jon & me to surveil their movements using the Apple WPS db.

In summary, if people haven't read this paper, I don't have the skill set
to explain the very simple concepts which are described in that paper.
 *Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning Systems*
 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14975>

The paper is about surveillance of masses (not individuals, per se),
knowing every single location of billions of router BSSIDs around the
world, from anywhere in the world, by anyone in the world, with zero
restrictions, which is only possible using Apple's WPS database (not
Google's, which has huge restrictions on both the input and output).

Apple has zero restrictions on the input.
And a restriction of the nearest 400 BSSIDs/GPS pairs on the output.

But... that restriction is meaningless, as I wrote and ran the Python code
on Windows that took the furthest away of those 400 to run it again. 

And again. And again. And again. I stopped at something like thousands.
So now I have the nearest ten thousand BSSIDs starting at my home.

Notice I have the GPS location of each of those unique ten thousand BSSIDs.

And, since apartments basically do not exist in this suburban area, I
actually know the names and address of the owners of record of those homes.

If any of those ten thousand people ever move, and take their router with
them, I will instantly know exactly where they moved to, within seconds.

Not only that, but I will instantly know the nearest 400 BSSIds, so if they
moved, oh, say, into someone else's home, I'll know exactly who that is.

To be very clear, this is only possible because of how Apple designed it.
Google and Mozilla designed their systems completely differently.

Only Apple's design is this bad in terms of privacy.

As for the hidden-BSSID issue, I was unaware of that until I found, to my
horror, my own hidden BSSIDs in Apple's WPS database. That was a shock!

At the time, I looked up Apple's public policy, and it was silent on the
issue of what Apple does when it encounters a hidden-broadcast BSSID.

When I brought it up to my next-door neighbor, who runs Apple Maps, he said
he'd check it out, which, after a few weeks of emails back and forth, we
found out that Apple has no intention of honoring the intent of a hidden
broadcast (even as we know Google & Mozilla certainly honor that intent).

The Apple lawyers made that very clear to me, as I was shut out from
talking to the engineers once the lawyers were informed of the issue.

I had given up, but recently, I happened to look at Apple's documentation,
and I realized Apple proved they had no intent of honoring the long-held
intention of a hidden broadcast, by simply changing their documentation.
 <https://support.apple.com/en-ie/102515>

Clearly, I know what I'm talking about, so my well informed assessment,
based on those verifiable facts, is Apple doesn't care about our privacy.
-- 
On Usenet we can have intelligent discussions with well-meaning people.