Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and share the results

Re:Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and... by ebfe1 on Saturday April 19, 2025 @09:16PM (#43740821)

Not exactly related but on the topic of finding target's location, A few years ago i used to run a little demo of capturing probe wifi ssid network on prefered network list of nearby devices and used https://wigle.net/ to identify places that people has visited... it was eye opening for some people in the audience for sure.

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Re:Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and... by az09mugen on Sunday April 20, 2025 @04:50AM (#43742499)

Wow, the map gives a good insight of where "technological humans" are concentrated.

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Re:Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and... by yapyap on Sunday April 20, 2025 @07:52AM (#43743215)

or where people are actually recording wifi networksk, wigle is kept up to date by volunteers

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Re:Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and... by xattt on Sunday April 20, 2025 @08:24AM (#43743351)

Complete dead zone in my area, even though the wifi SSIDs are saturated.

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Re:Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and... by thenthenthen on Sunday April 20, 2025 @12:22PM (#43744732)

That sounds like a super fun demo to do live! I have seen people om social media post their funny ssids around their house…please do not.

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Re:Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and... by sweetjuly on Sunday April 20, 2025 @08:11PM (#43747518)

Relatedly, one of my favorite recent papers is "Surveilling the Masses with Wi-Fi-Based Positioning System" [1]. In the paper, they (ab)use the fact that smartphones report the location of WiFi access points to public databases in order to track human migration over several large scale events (from natural disasters to the invasion of Ukraine).

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.14975

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