To save battery power on my HTC Desire last night I turned off GPS and WiFi whilst on my way to a mate’s birthday. The bus route I was taking was fairly unfamiliar to me so I was tracking the progress using Google Maps for Mobile. I noticed something rather odd: the light blue ‘accuracy’ circle around the ‘My Location‘ blob was a lot larger to what I was used to seeing. It also seemed to update a lot less frequently than I was used to.
Odd, I thought, as I believed that Google used network cell strength to obtain the location through triangulation. Surely the area of Leeds I was travelling to wasn’t in any more of a network blackspot than anywhere else in the city? Then I remembered reading on Friday about Google’s admission on capturing SSID information (and “accidentally” payload data too) from their Street View cars.
I turned WiFi on. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes the ‘My Location’ accuracy circle had shrunk right down around the central blob. Google was using both network cell strength and the physical location of visible WiFi routers in the residential area to find out where I was.So that must have been the reason why they captured all of that information from their “experimental WiFi project”. Impressive stuff.
I’ll let them off, but I don’t think the German DPA will give in so easily.
