Microsoft locks down Wi-Fi geolocation service after privacy concerns
People’s contextual data will be used to drive many apps in the future, from those which spit out e-coupon offers as you walk by the food court in the mall, to those that know you are home and open your garage door as you drive up.
If the new apps are to anticipate and automate, they must know our context, and the library of context data for users is going to include a lot of information that might scare some privacy advocates. How we protect user’s context data is key to success in the modern machine to machine language and application world.
User context is much much more than just location. It’s what you liked on facebook, it’s where you are at right now, it’s who your friends are, whether you are moving or not, whether you are sitting, standing, laying, when you ate last, and what you are doing with your device at the moment. Companies that learn to use context well will prosper in coming years, those who don’t will have a struggle on their hands.
Microsoft has restricted its Wi-Fi-powered geolocation database after a researcher investigating Wi-Fi geolocation and position tracking raised privacy concerns about the information recorded. This follows a similar move from Google, amidst identical privacy complaints.
A number of companies including Microsoft, Google, and Skyhook operate Wi-Fi geolocation databases as a means of providing quick and reasonably effective location information to phones, tablets, and laptop computers. Every Wi-Fi and Ethernet device has a unique identifier called a MAC address. Wi-Fi access points broadcast their MAC addresses so that any nearby machines can see the access point and connect to it. Companies building geolocation databases collect access point MAC addresses and GPS locations, then publish this information online. (Community projects such as Wigle accumulate similar databases.)
Smartphones and laptops can use these databases to perform quick location finding whenever they’re connected to a Wi-Fi access point. They do this by querying the database for the location of the access point that they’re currently using.