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Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

(timsh.org)
1957 points apokryptein | 2 comments | 02 Feb 25 17:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.461s | source
1. rsync ◴[03 Feb 25 01:59 UTC] No.42914110[source]▶
How much money is tied back to, or generated from, wifi AP SSID databases for geolocation ?

Because wow that would be simple to spoof and chaff and spam.

It's dinnertime here but if I had a few minutes I could make (my own house) appear indistinguishable from (Chase Center) from the perspective of SSID landscape.

It would cost nothing and is trivially easy. Even if they pair MAC addresses that's not a big hurdle. I'll bet relative signal strengths are not measured.

It might be a good flushing action[1].

[1] https://kozubik.com/items/FlushingAction/

replies(1): >>42916306 #
2. vv_ ◴[03 Feb 25 08:59 UTC] No.42916306[source]▶
Google's Geolocation Services used to charge 4$ for 1000 requests to their Cellular/Wi-Fi Geolocationing Service. Essentially you send a list of Wi-Fi MAC addresses and their associated RSSI values and get back a latitude and longitude with an accuracy metric. It was surprisingly good, when GPS wasn't available (sub 50 meters accuracy).