[ssl-3]

Wigle is not a thing that people know about. It isn't a secret (at all) -- in fact, it was created in part to raise awareness about the problems associated with open-by-default consumer wireless routers.

But, like (say) RIPE Atlas, it just isn't very commonly known.

Data in Wigle is collected mostly by wardriving, which (in a nutshell) is just driving around and passively recording the information that WiFi access points are shouting about themselves to whoever is listening.

The data is collected by volunteers, but it is not strictly free. The way that the project is funded is by selling the data to companies who use it for geolocation services.

Regular folks can do some basic searches on the dataset without cost, though, which is what the author has done here.