The Google Geolocation Nightmare. Google Places is big news this week but it is exposing a massive flaw in the methods Google uses to find out where searchers are physically located.
The main problem Google has is that they use IP geolocation which is woefully inaccurate in the UK. The second issue they have is that they use two separate systems – one for Adwords and one for the normal Google Places results. This brings up the ridiculous situation that when I search for “pizza” from my IP address in Harrogate Google shows Adwords ads for pizza restaurants near Manchester and Google Places results for pizza restaurants near Great Yarmouth. I use Sky Broadband and Google guesses my location differently every day, sometimes they get within 50 miles but most of the time it shows results hundreds of miles away.
S geolocation proof of concept. Google ditches all Street View Wi-Fi scanning. Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data.
The disclosure appeared in a report on Street View released today by Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who said that "collection is discontinued and Google has no plans to resume it. " Assembling an extensive list of the location of Wi-Fi access points can aid in geolocation, especially in areas where connections to cell towers are unreliable. Instead, Stoddart said that, based on her conversations with headquarters in Mountain View, Ca., "Google intends to obtain the information needed to populate its location-based services database" from "users' handsets. " That, at least, should come as no surprise.
Google's PC software takes a similar approach.