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by fitblipper 753 days ago
I am thinking of starting a competing product that uses wifi APs for geo location instead of GPS satellites. I want to be a more customer friendly business than google or apple though, it'll only be opt-in. All you have to do to indicate that you have opted-in is to append "_nomap" to your AP name. /s

If I understand correctly, the research was only possible because they were able to leverage the Google and apple APIs against each other. The lesson I get from this is these companies shouldn't behave like they exist in a vacuum and when exposing data or forcing global configuration (like the AP name) they need to be more careful.

1 comments

Dear friend,

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your _nomap geolocation service.

(Also, I note that the nomap.bot domain is available...)