Good on them but how does this work? If my neighbour scans my WiFi network and uploads it to BeaconDB I didn’t exactly opt-in, did I? The privacy policy mentions you can add ‘_optout’ to the WiFi name, so it’s more opt-out instead of opt-in?
Your WiFi network is broadcasting its presence 10 times a second in all directions. It is well known that you should not put sensitive information in your network SSID, for example, as anybody nearby can pick that up. Hence, you can opt out here instead.
Unless they only contribute networks that the device has authenticated with.
To clarify: all phones doing geolocation are already uploading your AP macaddr to remote location services, but BeaconDB will *not* publish this information in cleartext.
Any data dump will contain only non-reversible cryptographically hashed data or aggregated data.
This is a really interesting problem, and I've loved thinking about it recently. If you're keen on it too I'm happy to discuss further, feel free to reach out.