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Somewhat related is positioning your WiFi AP based on passive signal strength monitoring. Both Apple and Google do this to maintain their own private WiFi posit
by r1ch 9y ago
Somewhat related is positioning your WiFi AP based on passive signal strength monitoring. Both Apple and Google do this to maintain their own private WiFi positioning databases, but there are also public databases with this information too. http://find-wifi.mylnikov.org/ http://find-wifi.mylnikov.org/ is a great example of this - I was very surprised to find a brand new AP I'd installed less than six months ago already in the DB! I wonder how they track it - I certainly don't expect many people to be running their tracking apps. Perhaps there is some reporting SDK that gets bundled with certain free apps?
The author of the above page has a WiFi positioning demo app for iPhone and Android that uses those public databases - during my testing it was almost as accurate as GPS (even more so indoors) with instant results.
- Mister_Snuggles 9y agoIf I had to guess, Apple and Google use the GPS on the phones plus the WiFi information to feed back into those databases. It makes sense for them to do this as it helps improve the accuracy of their location services.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoPresumably they also wardrive (war-fly with directional antennae??) when they're making maps/streetview?
- kej 9y agoNo presumably about it, there was some minor outrage that they were capturing traffic when it first happened: http://www.pcworld.com/article/198667/google_wifi_data_capture_unethical_but_not_illegal.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/198667/google_wifi_data_captu...
- wooptoo 9y agoIt's called wardriving, and there's a huge db available for free at wigle.net