Posted by nicosalm 11/19/2025
That said, I hope the service doesn't implicitly trust data sent by untrusted clients like web browsers, otherwise someone could just use something like this to send it a false location: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/spoof-geolocation/i...
The BSSID is unique per SSID, per AP. The BSSID is usually derived (usually by incrementing the last octet) from the AP MAC address, however.
So an AP MAC might be 77:99:44:EE:C4:11.
It has a wireless network called "Bob's SSID". It will have a BSSID of something like 77:99:44:EE:C4:12.
Then, the AP may be broadcasting another called "Mary's SSID", and it will have a BSSID of something like 77:99:44:EE:C4:13.
Edit: More not-well-written info on BSSIDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_set_(802.11_network)
Looks like the BSSID is derived from the AP serial number by some vendors. Never seen that myself.
And then see if you can be magically transported somewhere else.
Consumer router firmware UIs, typically owned by ISPs, I'd not expect that yeah. Some don't even let you pick a WiFi band anymore and require other changes to be submitted through an ISP portal on the web somewhere (thinking of Belgium here, not sure which ISP it was)
Sure, some hacker somewhere will screw with these databases by rotating their AP MAC Address regularly but 99.9% are not going to touch it and 99.9% is good enough for location databases.
Trilaterate (or multilaterate). Angulation uses angle, like a directional antenna, constructive/destructive interference for beamforming (this is how airplane landing systems work if I'm understanding it correctly), or optics like our two eyes, to find the angles to a target from known positions in order to determine its position in space
Trilateration is based on distances from known locations, determined either by signal delay (GNSS does that; newer cell towers also but call it "timing advance") or signal strength (used with both WiFis and cell towers)
> locally, given the WiFi hotspots
You'll also need a local database with the hotspots' positions (usually those aren't actually measured but estimated from observations at different locations). I'm not aware of a device that ships with this, nor popular software that uses it as its primary method, as such databases are many gigabytes. Thus this is typically not local; you're sharing your data (thus location) with the server which then kindly tells you where it thinks you are