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How does turning on wifi enable better phone location tracking?

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Beamin:
When those google cars drove (I think they are constantly driving around updating) around they had wifi antennas on them. They would take note of the MAC addresses and when there was four they can triangulate, I would also imagine they collect IP's with the MAC and link to peoples google accounts reveling a database of peoples home addresses/names and who your physical friends/family are. Simple algorithms can figure all this out. Scary stuff



https://youtu.be/VFns39RXPrU

Ranayna:
I don't think that the Street View cars are the main source for MAC locations. At least not anymore.
I remember that they got splapped down somewhat in Germany when it became public that the cars collected MAC adresses, so they were not allowed to uses them in Germany. Obviously there is no way to prove if they complied or not. But the bigger issue is outdated information. Routers change ;) If maybe not as often as smartphones.
The Streetview car, unless you have an open WiFi, will also *not* be able to gather any IP information about your router or ISP. It would have to connect to be able to do that.

But why would they even need the info from the cars anymore nowadays?
Once an Android phone has a proper GPS fix for the first time in a certain area, it can now scan for WiFi, and transmit all gathered information about the MACs in that area to the mothership. Very likely, this happens everytime a GPS location is established. The next time it needs a fix it can pre determine the area to about 200 meters, obviously assuming that the WiFi MAC has not changed location.
And the phone, when connected to the WiFi, *can* of course gather IP information. Your external IP, and the WiFi IP of the phone will certainly be transmitted as part of the protocol, but i do not know if the phone would actually go ahead and actively scan your network. I somwhat doubt that, because stuff like that tends to get noticed. But since you are logged in to the phone with a Google account, the IP address is not something Google really needs, or rather already has anyway ;)

AkiTaiyo:
You can always opt-out (https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632) if you think that Google will actually respect this!

duckduck:
I assume that Apple is also collecting MAC addresses / ESSIDs via WiFi and pairing them with GPS coordinates and then sending them back to the mothership while I've got both the GPS and WiFi chips turned on. Another good reason to disable WiFi while you're out and about is that (up until IOS 13 or so) your phone was trackable by its MAC address. Apple wants to be the only company that can track iPhones, so now iPhones spoof a MAC for each SSID. This complicates things for business that track people by WiFi on their phone, but it doesn't make their job impossible. Anyway, your phone leaks more than your location over WiFi. Some stores use cell phone WiFi location information to see where customers walk and how long they stand in certain areas. If I'm at a store I'm buying something anyway, so they have my credit card, but I'd rather not be part of their marketing data set, even if it is anonymized.

Ranayna:
Yes, there is no reason to assume that Apple does not do the same. I have at least a smidge more trust in Apple (that is still not much, mind you) that they will not sell the data to just anyone who wants it.
And yes, while they have implemented "Private MAC" for connecting to Wifi, they have also made Bluetooth unable to be fully deactivated from the control center. And the location tracking by stores you mention is generally done with Bluetooth instead of WiFi. ;)

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