Evil ⇥

Brian Ambrozy:

In an official blog post yesterday, Google announced that they were offering “greater choice for wireless access point owners” by allowing them to opt-out of being entered into Google’s location-based search results.

Bit irritating that it’s opt-out instead of opt-in, but it’s good that Google is offering this option. I mean, their slogan is “do no evil”. Sounds great. Seeing as Google knows what IP address and MAC number I’m browsing from, I should be able to opt out of this with a simple link in my Google settings, right?

The method to accomplish this could be considered almost belligerently inelegant: change the name of your SSID to append the term “_nomap” on it.

Seriously? This is the best you can do, Google?

Furthermore, there is no way to remove your previously-mapped access point from Google’s directory until they get around to re-mapping your neighbourhood.