Wires are good. Wireless is not. I don’t like every iOS device & Android device that walks by my place of living to log my SSID, MAC, etc, and feed that to surveillance capitalists who I boycott. While I do take care to end my SSID with “_optout_nomap”, I don’t trust it. The phone is also leakin...
The same was said about social security numbers until SSNs started becoming a primary key to every-fucking-thing which can cross-reference records in countless databases not even associated to the social security office.
Of course SSIDs are sensitive when the context is that they point to where you’ve been & then associate that to where you are right now in realtime; which is then shared with the centralized DB of a surveillance capitalist. When they are coupled to MAC addresses. When snooping cars drive around and record physical locations which are then tied to SSIDs and MAC addresses.
And what if your SSID is “impeach Trump again”, which then pins you to a political leaning that can be exploited in Cambridge Analytica style attacks on democracy? Logs that your phone attempts to connect to that SSID then associates your phone to that.
None of that actually matters, because it's the users themselves that have chosen to use WiFi and to broadcast the SSID. If I published my dick picks on the web and then went around naked then you could conceivably correlate the dick pic to my person and my current location. But you wouldn't be breaching my privacy in doing so.
Seems like one could just disable wifi and use a USB Ethernet adapter, or failing that if you want to connect directly to a PC, have the PC act as a USB Ethernet adapter.
That was my first idea too but I ruled it out on the principle that I shouldn’t need to buy more hardware. I also assumed that couldn’t be easy to attach to an unrooted phone.