When Google drives around on the street taking photos for Google StreetView, they also collect your Computer Router name and location – why?

Google says, “Location services play an important part in enabling many of today’s most popular location-aware applications, in particular on smart phones, laptops and other devices that are WiFi enabled. The inclusion of your WiFi access point in the Google Location Server enables applications like Google Maps to work better and more accurately.”

Basically if you stand on a street corner, your smartphone will bring up all he networks that it can use to access WiFi – hopefully you have password protected your router’s WiFi and not just used the built-in password of 1234 or 0000. If you have not password protected your WiFi signal – DO IT NOW!

And choose WPA2 – the newest security setting.

If you do not know the default password on your router (besides the instructions manual), you can look it up here.

Essentially you have to add this suffix to your Router’s SSID “address”

_nomap.

Note the period at the end.

This will require you to re-choose this router WiFi and enter your password again as your SSID address is now no longer BOBROUTER11 but now

BOBROUTER11_nomap.

You can read more at Google.

Extra geek – This just notes to Google NOT to record your WiFi SSID, most routers including the Apple Extreme lets you turn off broadcasting this name-address entirely selecting a checkbox so no one can see your network while randomly walking by but keep in mind, with password protection, they cannot join your WiFi network anyway.

AND if you want to add a new device, instead of it discovering your WiFi address and you typing a password to join, you have to remember the EXACT NAME of your router/Wifi network first including all caps, punctuation, underscores, numbers, etc, etc … and professionals can buy off the shelf software to sniff out your network anyway so while you can do it – keep in mind it’s probably more annoying and inconvenient for you to turn the name portion off entirely but if you do, be sure to write the EXACT router name down somewhere. 🙂