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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.

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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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