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Pretty sure Apple use Skyhook - or at least they used to for geolocation

So how does Skyhook still work for iPhones? Apple made the mac addresses private on IOS14 and they rotate every 24hrs to prevent wifi tracking. So did Apple make the data private to then be able to sell themselves to Skyhook? Seems like it

Apple uses/used Skyhook to geolocate where a Wifi network was- that's it.

I suspect it's by now a crowdsourced database as well: Updates seem to happen way too frequently to make manual car-based tracking plausible.

Skyhook might still be running the actual database and augmenting it with their own manual scans, though, but I strongly suspect that any Apple device with GPS is contributing its location data back to it.

Skyhook apparently threatens companies that try to crowdsource such things, case in point Mozilla. So, you're either paying off the patent troll or using their services.

What I mean by crowdsourcing here isn't Apple bootstrapping a parallel database, either using Skyhook or their own GPS-only data, but rather them feeding into Skyhook. I'd be very surprised if Skyhook was opposed to that.

Given the ubiquity of Apple devices, I wouldn't even be surprised if Skyhook paid Apple at this point.

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