Some places that Google associated with devices Wi-Fi, discovered in a coffee shop in San Francisco.
Google has taken steps to limit the disclosure of the locations of millions of iPhones, laptops and other devices with Wi-Fi connection after a CNET article said about privacy.
The movement of Google comes after the company headquartered in Mountain View, California was criticized for the way that made a database of collected mobile byAndroid and Street View cars available to the public, although it could be linked to a geographical location with a unique address of a Wi-Fi enabled device hardware. The change means that Google now seems to be approaching the approach adopted by Apple and Microsoft, never made public its location databases.
A source close to Google said that there have been some changes to the way Google location server processes requests for location. A Google spokesman refused to comment.
Devices Wi-Fi enabled, including PCs, iPhones, iPads, and Android phones, transmit a hardware identifier only, called a MAC address, to anyone within a radius of approximately 100 to 200 feet. Until that is the article published on CNET, June 15 if someone captured or knew that unique address, Google server could reveal a previous location, where he was, including home or work addresses or even addresses frequented restaurants that device.
It was not clear what changes of Google to provide more privacy protection, which could include does not respond to some types of requests for location or specific geographical regions. The database is used to accelerate solutions of geolocation to mobile devices and to provide the ability to determine the location of computers that do not have access to the GPS derived coordinates.
Approximately 3,000 addresses MAC that CNET tried during the past few days, did not submit a Google database location. By June 15, database of Google showed them as appearing in places as diverse as Satsuma, Alabama, near Charing Cross station in London, Newport News, Virginia, outside of Beijing, China, and so on.
But Nick Doty, Professor at the University of California at Berkeley that co-teaches the technology and political practice, said Google's service appears to be return of results when you use a browser instead of a Perl or Python script. "Perhaps only try against people who use for independent tests", said Doty, whose laptop was linked in Google database to its former home in the neighborhood of Capitol Hill in Seattle.
Approximately 10 per cent of laptop computers and mobile phones via Wi-Fi appear have been listed above by Google as relevant to postal addresses. In an earlier statement, Google said: "collect MAC addresses publicly broadcast Wi-Fi hotspots." If a user has enabled wireless tethering on a mobile device, this device becomes a Wi-Fi access point, which is why the MAC address of the access point also could be included in the database. "Wi-Fi hotspots that move frequently are not helpful to our database of location and we take several steps to try to dismiss them."
A spokesman for Google, however, refused to say that only access points appear in the location of the company database. Alissa Cooper, Chief Scientist of team at the Center for democracy and technology and the co-Chairman of an Internet Engineering Task Force in geolocation, says that his laptop was never used as a Wi-Fi access point. Your previous address of the Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., where he lived from 2007 to 2009, however, was included.
Get better control over location data
Kim Cameron, architect of main identity of Microsoft until the beginning of this year, to the same conclusion. In a trial of June 2010, which examined an independent report (PDF) of Street View data collection, Cameron wrote that Google recorded sites and MAC addresses much more fixed points of Wi-Fi access.
"There is no question," he wrote. "The MAC addresses of all the laptops for Wi-Fi and phones in households, businesses, enterprises and Government buildings were recorded by driveby mappingcars, as they were the wireless access points, and this regardless of the use of encryption."
Google seems to be making changes to your database location. For aniPhone previously shown in Brisbane, Australia, a Web interface of Google recently created by amateur hacker Samy Kamkar location database returned to a latitude of 0 and a length of 0 (to the West of Angola in the Atlantic Ocean). Last night, for the same MAC address of the Australian iPhone, the Web site had an error message instead.
Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington electronic privacy information center, D.C., in comparison with the movement of Google to the decision of Apple in April to fix what he calls an iPhone "bug" that could register visited previous locations, which came in the public interest in the subject began to rise.
"Even the companies do not understand how you are collecting data based on the location," said Rotenberg. "This is one of the reasons why the emphasis in this area should be on best practices, policies not better privacy".
Google location database could previously used, in some cases, to follow the movements. A device HTC connection to a San Francisco hot spot South of Wi-Fi market moved from the BWI Airport to a postal address in a suburb of Atlanta in a day. Another device that research security Ashkan Soltani spotted at a café in San Francisco, which moved from the engineering building of Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, across the main road towards the center of the University.
A statement from April 2010 (PDF) of Raphael Leiteritz, Google Product Manager, says that the location database is accessed by sending "a list of MAC addresses that are currently visible to the device". In response, Google compares the address "with your list of known MAC addresses", and then returns the "approximate location". Senate testimony (PDF) by the director of public policy last month Google Alan Davidson said: "a database of known network locations is necessary to determine the estimated location of a user of any information from the Tower of point or cell of the Wi-Fi access".
Certainly, it is not always easy to learn MAC addresses. Usually it is not transmitted over the Internet. But anyone within range of Wi-Fi can record and is easy to define what MAC addresses correspond to what manufacturer. Someone like a suspicious spouse, who can move to the screen on an iPhone can get it too.
Revelation: McCullagh is married to an employee of Google not involved in this issue.
Source
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