Recently got into this and have mapped most of my area. There's a bit of insecure networks that I could hop on but it's mostly noise in the sea of the internet.
The most interesting thing I have discoved so far is that my elderly neighbors have a CPAP machine. I found out because that CPAP broadcasts BLE. I didn't look much into it, but medical devices shouldn't be broadcasting anything imo.
This is the reason I stopped contributing eventually. Can't download the db, API limits so low you can exhaust them with a couple exploratory queries, and a small group of people getting overly defensive when asked about it. I don't mind working for free, but this sucked the fun out of it.
I'll always remember that one free WiFi I had at my temporary housing at Timberlawn Apartments when I started at Microsoft: it was "Bring Food and Beer to B308". I thought it was a neighbor, but I couldn't find the apartment when I looked for it.
I feel like "internet" and/or "wifi" deserve an honorable mention in that they are probably defaults on something but are more likely above #1 due to people setting them as the SSID manually.
Apple also maintains a similar database (though with only BSSID and not SSID). You can find all the BSSIDs in one area via the tile API or straight up dump the whole thing.
It's kind of crazy to see how prevalent MYChevrolet and/or myGMC are. There are more MYChevrolet / myGMC SSIDs than attwifi. I have to think this is because so many people are doing the stumbling from inside of a vehicle.
I was under the impression you could opt out of this using ‘no_map’ at the end of your WiFi, but after reading the FAQ I saw no mention of it. Then searching based on SSID, sure enough there are tons of entries matching “%no_map”.
I would like to ask, what practical uses do similar data have in production scenarios? For example, to count the density of a crowd? Verify the authenticity of a company or for other purposes?
Location backup for where GPS isn't reliable. If you've got the signal strength of a few networks with known coordinates, triangulating can give enough of a location guide to be significantly better than nothing.
iOS, to the bane of network admins everywhere, doesn't allow 3rd party apps to request permission to scan for Wi-Fi networks. The closest you can get to a proper scan is downloading the old AirPort utility, enabling a hidden setting in Settings for the app which displays a scan button in the app, and then using that.
I wonder if this isn't a GDPR violation of a pretty large magnitude? Especially because the way to get removed is this:
> If you want a record removed from the database, please include the BSSID (MAC Address) of the network in question!
There have already been a few wifi tracking cases within the EU where the perpetrators lost. A lot of this was used to track people in things like shopping malls though, so it's not exactly the same, but what came out of them was basically that people have to opt-in rather than opt-out if you want to do any sort of tracking.
As far as I'm aware this type of data does not meet the requirements [0] for a GDPR violation and there was a bit of initial litigation around Google's street view data gathering which left this part out as well (e.g. [1] for a somewhat recent discussion).