![]() And now other passersby without state-of-the-art GPS antennas on their phone can find their own locations quickly. All Google needs to do is scoop up the phone’s GPS location at the time it is connected to your router, and it now has your router’s approximate location. A passerby with an Android phone will do that quite nicely. Now that Google has a way to identify your router, it only needs a location to associate it with. Because a wireless router broadcasts its SSID (the WiFi network’s name) as part of the “hello” it sends, there is now a way to identify it other than through its IP address (which in all likelihood will change anyway at some point in the future).Īnother way is through the router’s unique MAC address. Most people don’t bother to turn off antennas on their phones, so they usually have GPS and WiFi on concurrently. How does Google work out your location then? In fact, it doesn’t even present its IP address unless a device manages to connect to it (meaning that if you require a password to connect to your network, you’re not broadcasting your IP address for the world to see). Your router gives Google no indication of its geographical location. ![]() the billing address you have with your ISP) is not common knowledge. Technically, the address your IP is registered to (i.e. How Does Google Know Where Access Points Are? Sometimes the difference in time is minuscule, but if your GPS antenna sucks like mine does, using WiFi to determine your location is not only faster but yields more accurate results within a very short period of time. Try this experiment one day with your smartphone: Open Google Maps and allow it to use WiFi to track your location. Because of this (along with the fact that people usually don’t relocate their WiFi access points all willy nilly), Wi-Fi can technically be more reliable than GPS for geolocation especially within urban centers. This is in stark contrast to GPS satellite technology which could be affected by cloud cover and other aspects that may interfere with the signal’s long journey from outer space. WiFi is a solid radio technology that works in any weather with very little interference. In an era where smartphones are ubiquitous, this is a very easy task. The only thing they need is to try to connect to your WiFi router and correlate the contact with a location. This is a little trick of geolocation, and no, you do not need to provide your consent for this. ![]() Just when you thought that your location on this planet wasn’t so painstakingly obvious to every single company you come into contact with online, you go on Google Maps and find that somehow Google knows exactly where your house is and points its location out with a little blue dot. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |