Those FCC registration records would then be public information.
Would you feel comfortable with your name, address and MAC + SSID of your wireless AP(s) being registered in a public database and the onus on you to keep that registration information up to date every time you changed the SSID or swapped in something with a different MAC address?
I'm not sure I would be.
The ethics around Google's behavior aside - this is a tricky problem to solve.
Edit: Why the downvotes? I'd really like for people that disagree to engage and tell me where I am either wrong or not arguing in good faith. If you believe this is a Google specific problem or somehow an easy problem to solve under the current FCC regulatory regime I'd be happy to hear about it.
I just don't see either approach (opt-in vs opt-out) being workable in practice though.
Taking it to a bit of a silly extreme - what happens when 100 different companies want to use public SSID data? 100 different opt-in codes? 1 code for all? What if I want to allow 5 companies out of that 100 to use that data and exclude the other 95?
Would you feel comfortable with your name, address and MAC + SSID of your wireless AP(s) being registered in a public database and the onus on you to keep that registration information up to date every time you changed the SSID or swapped in something with a different MAC address?
I'm not sure I would be.
The ethics around Google's behavior aside - this is a tricky problem to solve.
Edit: Why the downvotes? I'd really like for people that disagree to engage and tell me where I am either wrong or not arguing in good faith. If you believe this is a Google specific problem or somehow an easy problem to solve under the current FCC regulatory regime I'd be happy to hear about it.