Many retailers, like Starbucks and McDonald's, offer Wi-Fi access for
their customers. We know the SSIDs for these APs a priori, but not their
BSSIDs. Could we cross-reference a map of Starbucks and McDonald's store
locations with their SSIDs? If my phone sees a "Starbucks" SSID and
GeoIP says I'm in San Francisco, then my position is probably near one
of ~100 Starbucks stores in SF. This scheme would only work on the
client-side, because our server doesn't know any SSIDs.
I wonder if retailers like Starbucks or McDonald's would share their
stores' Wi-Fi BSSIDs. Unlike carriers, retail stores don't have a
competitive incentive to keep their wireless network locations secret.
Also, my friend suggested that garbage trucks would be great for
stumbling. They slowly drive the same route, up and down every city
street, every week. If they were stumbling for us, we would get very
complete and frequently-updated data. We would just need to slap some
inexpensive Arduino or Raspberry Pi stumbling devices onto garbage
trucks around the world. Some city governments might actually be
supportive of a project like this to survey their city.
chris
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