From CNET News
Street View cars grabbed locations of phones, PCs
by Declan McCullagh
Google's Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world, a practice that raises novel privacy concerns, CNET has confirmed....
The confirmation comes as concerns about location privacy appear to be growing. Apple came under fire in April for recording logs of approximate location data on iPhones, and eventually released a fix. That controversy sparked a series of disclosures about other companies' location privacy practices, questions and complaints from congressmen, a pair of U.S. Senate hearings, and the now-inevitable lawsuits seeking class action status.
A previous CNET article, published June 15 and triggered by the research of security consultant [and 2009 School of Information alumnus] Ashkan Soltani, was the first to report that Google made these unique hardware IDs--called MAC addresses--publicly available through a Web interface. Google curbed the practice about a week later.
But it was unclear at the time whether Google's location database included the hardware IDs of only access points and wireless routers or client devices, such as computers and mobile phones, as well.
Anecdotal evidence suggested they had been swept up. Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology and co-chair of an Internet Engineering Task Force on geolocation, said her 2009 home address was listed in Google's location database. Nick Doty, a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley [School of Information] who co-teaches the Technology and Policy Lab, found that Google listed his former home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle.
"It would be helpful to have some clarity about why and how (a hardware address) got in there so people can act accordingly," says Soltani, the security researcher....