The "when done by individuals" doesn't really apply where the web's involved because it's extremely cheap to harness the efforts of many individuals. I don't kn

The "when done by individuals" doesn't really apply where the web's involved because it's extremely cheap to harness the efforts of many individuals. I don't know how many access points Google has in their database, but Wigle has over 20 million in theirs, collected by thousands of people on every continent. I don't know how Wigle is funded, but my impression is that they're a pretty low-overhead operation. My point is that if you're concerned about the privacy implications of an access point database, you should be concerned no matter who's putting it together.