robert.schuppenies.de – weblog

Get the physical location of wireless router from its MAC address (BSSID)

A nice company called SkyHook Wireless has been war driving the country for years. Basically they’ve been paying people to ride around in cars and record the unique IDs (BSSID, aka MAC address) that your wireless routers broadcast. Doesn’t matter if your router has encryption on or not, its BSSID is still public and in their database (if they’ve driven past your house). They’ve then taken all this information and put it in a huge database. They’ve even made a nice little javascript API which given a BSSID will tell you its longitude and latitude.