Your assumptions are completely wrong. This is nothing to do with whether an access point is public, private, encrypted or not. It is not used to populate a dat

Your assumptions are completely wrong. This is nothing to do with whether an access point is public, private, encrypted or not. It is not used to populate a database of public wifi points. Instead it's used to correlate publicly transmitted SSIDs with longitude and latitude. Such a database allows wifi-capable devices (including your laptop's browser) to somewhat reasonably geolocate without GPS (or, more common, more quickly but less accurately before a GPS fix is available). Anyone outraged about this needs to extend the same outrage to Apple, Skyhook, among many others doing exactly the same thing. With no mechanism of opting out at all (because, really, opting out is ridiculous anyways). HN, to some degree, is hijacked (including its own administration that hellbans people who hold contrary opinions). Somehow this useless rant by Siegler -- about a complete non-issue -- sits at #4. Another useless article, quoting Gruber, hit the front-page yesterday. If I could exclude the votes of anyone who hit up arrow on either of those, HN would be a much more interesting site.