From CNET News
Google curbs Web map exposing phone locations
By Declan McCullagh
Google has taken steps to limit the disclosure of the locations of millions of iPhones, laptops, and other devices with Wi-Fi connections after a CNET article drew attention to privacy concerns.
The move by Google comes after the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was criticized for the way it made a database assembled by Android phones and Street View cars available to the public, even though it could link a geographical location with a unique hardware address of a Wi-Fi enabled device. The change means that Google now appears to be moving closer to the approach adopted by Apple and Microsoft, which never made their location databases public....
Out of approximately 3,000 MAC addresses that CNET tested over the last few days, not one delivered a location from Google's database. Before June 15, Google's database showed them as appearing in locations as varied as Satsuma, Ala., near Charing Cross station in London, Newport News, Va., outside of Beijing, China, and so on.
But Nick Doty [MIMS 2010], a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley [School of Information] who co-teaches the Technology and Policy Lab, said Google's service appeared to be returning results when used in a browser instead of a Perl or Python script. "Maybe they're just trying to crack down on people using it for independent testing," said Doty, whose laptop had been linked in Google's database to his previous home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle....
Google's location database could previously be used, in a few cases, to track movements. One HTC device connecting to a San Francisco South of Market Wi-Fi hot spot moved from the BWI airport to a street address in an Atlanta suburb in one day. Another device that security researcher Ashkan Soltani [MIMS 2009] spotted in a San Francisco coffeehouse moved from the engineering building of Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany, across the main road to the university center....