Google Also Has Unintrusive Ways of Gathering Wi-Fi Data
Google Also Has Unintrusive Ways of Gathering Wi-Fi Data
Posted 06/29/2010 at 11:04pm
| by Pulkit Chadna
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Unlike its surreptitious malicious-code-on-a-Street-View-car method of collecting Wi-Fi data, Google has an unintrusive way of accomplishing the task using mobile applications. Google's database of Wi-Fi hot spots is most likely to swell every time a user tracks his mobile phone's location using Wi-Fi triangulation or uses geolocation-enabled web services on a laptop.
This is because Google receives the MAC (media access control) address of each and every Wi-Fi hot spot in the user's vicinity (read: within range) on such occasions, allowing its database to be updated automatically to reflect the discovery of new Wi-Fi hot spots.
This method is unlikely to ruffle any feathers as no payload data is collected. According to Steve Lee, a group product manager at Google, all Wi-Fi data is anonymous and users can prevent the "anonymous location data" from being sent to Google.
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