SpaceX is smart on this, Cupertino and GL.iNet not so much
Academics have suggested that Apple's Wi-Fi Positioning System can be abused to create a global privacy nightmare.
Apple is one of several companies, along with Google, Skyhook, and others, that operate a WPS. They offer client devices a way to determine their location that's more energy efficient than using the Global Positioning System . For mobile phones, WPS also has less of a power drain than GPS. Either it calculates the client position and returns those coordinates, or it returns the geolocations of the submitted BSSIDs and lets the client perform the calculations to determine its location.
"In Apple's version, you submit BSSIDs to geolocate, and it returns the geolocation it believes the BSSID is at," said Rye."It also returns many more that you didn't request that are nearby. The additional 400 were really important for our study, as they allowed us to accumulate a large quantity of geolocated BSSIDs in a short period of time. Additionally, Apple's WPS is not authenticated or rate limited and is free to use.
The paper goes on to explore various scenarios in which this sort of location data could be used for, including damage assessment after an attack , individual tracking using BSSIDs from GL.iNet travel routers, and tracing military movements in Ukraine via Starlink terminal BSSIDs. "They had begun having some of their products implement BSSID randomization during our study in 2023, but sped up the implementation on all of their Starlink devices after we spoke to them," he said."It's worth noting that this vulnerability wasn't caused by SpaceX , but they dealt with it promptly and the right way nonetheless."
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