[Noisebridge-discuss] [dorkbotsf-blabber] google war driving

[Ian Atha]

This was 2~3 years ago. I believe that the Street View cars were just
being designed at the time.

In my experience, Google's 20% projects often go the hacky/cheap way
prior to general audience releases. Google collecting this information
and deducing locations costs as much as the one-time cost of an
engineer writing the code, and the incremental (but transparent) cost
of re-running the deduction algorithm. I bet this is cheaper than
licensing such a database, given the massive map-reduce infrastructure
available freely to any Googler.

On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 21:57, Andy Isaacson <adi at hexapodia.org> wrote:
> On Sat, May 01, 2010 at 09:45:00PM -0700, Ian Atha wrote:
>> information regarding cell towers along with queries. Reliable sources
>> claim that such a database exists and it successfully managed to
>> correlate cell towers to locations. (If everybody who's in tower-A,
>> tower-B and tower-C searches directions from 18th & Guerrero to X,
>> then said towers must cover 18th & Guerrero.)
>
> Um, the FCC maintains a public database of (some?) cell tower physical
> locations, the carriers are happy to sell value-added geolocation
> information to information brokers, and it's even more trivial for the
> streetview cars to collect tower IDs than to collect wifi MACs.  Trying
> to reverse the mapping as you suggest seems silly.
>
> -andy
>