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Comment by fooboo | Hacker News Reader

But now there are services to lookup the owner mapped to the house. It's not apples to apples here. A house is stationary, there is a 1-to-1 mapping: house number to name. But say you have a wifi laptop and it is established that a MAC maps to you with reasonable certainty, then it's certainly possible to track your movements using that information.

IMO, I find that Buzz messages on Google Maps to be extremely creepy and am willing to bet a good portion of people doing so have no idea that they can be visualized that way.

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It's only 1:1 MAC:House if you're the only wifi network and house in a reasonable range. And in that case, if you're broadcasting your wifi network, you set the 1:1 mapping up yourself.

Frankly, I don't even know if I'm upset with this. If you throw a signal into the public, you don't then get to decide how people use it.

At least, that's the argument we've always used against corporations that try to legally control how publicly broadcast information gets used by those who receive it.

> It's only 1:1 MAC:House if you're the only wifi network and house in a reasonable range.

I suspect it would be possible to triangulate the position of a wifi network in an urban environment.

Maybe you can set Tomato to vary the router radio's power output :)

Most people don't know they are throwing a signal into the public. They are just setting up a tool to check email, Facebook, and talk on Skype. It's not immediately obvious to them what exactly is happening.

And please don't blame the consumers for their lack of knowledge in this. You don't need to know how a car works to drive, nor how a DVD player works to watch movies, nor is it essential to know how a computer works to use it.

What's the threat if someone has your MAC address?

If you throw a signal into the public, you don't then get to decide how people use it

Depends… I can only speak for my own country (Denmark) where we do have rules about what information others are allowed to record and permanently store. Similar to there also being rules about when video surveillance is allowed, and if allowed, who can have access to the tapes and for how long these are allowed to be stored.

> But say you have a wifi laptop and it is established that a MAC maps to you with reasonable certainty, then it's certainly possible to track your movements using that information.

IIRC they are talking about the MAC address of the AP, not of the people connected to the AP. Unless you take your AP with you to coffee houses people aren't going to be using Google data to track you.

This may also shine some light: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1628642&cid=3195...

Triangulating an ap location isn't quick (trust me; I've spent hours trying to nail some down in the past!). Given how short a time the car is in the area I would imagine the accuracy wold be no better than a geoip location on your ip.

GeoIP seems to utterly fail where I’m living. It’s often several dozen kilometers off and I have never seen it being off by less than one kilometer.

Skyhook wireless is maybe twenty meters off where I’m right now. No contest.

Sorry it was more referring to tying an ap location to ts correct location. It's not verc accurate.

Skyhook overcomes that, I guess, by aggregating data so the error is lower.

Skyhook does the same thing Google is doing. They drive around with GPS on and record MAC addresses. Then they correlate the two.

They know which group of MAC addresses are "visible" at which GPS coordinates.

They also do constant updates to the database every time a device queries Skyhook.

Sorry I probably didn't explain my point very well.

I doubt the Skyhook database is any more accurate than Google's. To get really good triangulation you need an hour or so of driving round the target area (360 degrees for best results). Bearing in mind they dont drive around all that much - in a town, for example, the accuracy for individual AP's will be measured in 10's of meters or possibly more. Quite often when wardriving I will triangulate AP's to 500m or more distance from previous runs.

In terms of the Skyhook service they can get much greater accuracy by using multiple access points to aggregate out the error.

(Im sure their accuracy improves a little every time you get your location from the service - but I bet it's not perfect)

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