Google is in the news today again for those Snooping StreetView cameras doing more than taking pictures.
Europeans have been much more aggressive about limiting the types of data that companies collect about people and their obligations to keep that data private. Google just was fined about $143,000 for violating those laws in France according to that story.
The Apple iPhone tracking story a few months ago surfaced a practice that was not widely known, at least I don’t think so. Many GPS devices don’t actually rely on GPS, at least not completely. It can take a while to get an accurate “fix” on your location, waiting for enough satellites to fly overhead and correlate their position data, all the more difficult if you’re in a moving car.
So devices take a shortcut (including the iPhone). At least two firms have built up databases of the location of WiFi routers located in most people’s residential homes and businesses. As you’re driving down the street, the device is looking at the MACIDs (a unique device ID assigned to every WiFi device) of the WiFi routers that are nearby, and that gets you within 100 feet or so of where you are (assuming the WiFI router doesn’t move, which is a generally safe assumption)
So Google’s little “Don’t be Evil” spy cars are gathering up that data for commercial resale, as well as use on their own phones. But MAC ids are not just your router – every device in your network is constantly identifying itself.
What this means is that if you have a cell phone that is WiFi Enabled and the Google Spy Car goes by, it notices the Mac ID of your Cell phone and logs it – establishing that the phone was at a specific location at a specific time.
Now this is the Wifi MAC id only – the Cell Phone has another unique identifier(s) for accessing the Cell Phone network (Voice and 2G/3G/4G) called the IMEI and ICCID (GSM/SIM based phones) or the ESN (CDMA). These unique serial numbers are used in 128 bit encryption of the data, and can’t be derived from watching the datastream.
If your phone is Bluetooth enabled, it also has a MAC ID it is sending out, but the range of Bluetooth is smaller than WiFi and mostly in portable devices that would not be very useful for tracking.
A related thing to think about – several governments have created the ability for a missile to home in on a specific cell phone. If you’re a terrorist leader in Yemen, but sure to have someone else carry your cell phone for you, but don’t tell them why.
If you have an iPhone, there is an app called eWiFi that shows you all of the WiFi hotspots in range. As your iPhone stays in one place and is left on and gets a more and more accurate GPS fix, that essentially also makes the GPS coordinates of your WiFi Router more precise (without having to drive a GoogleSpy car past your house)