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People really out there mapping SSID’s? I fail to understand how that data is at all valuable, changing an SSID takes seconds and a gram of brain power.
There's literally websites where you can search for them.
Very few people actually change their SSID. The bigger point is that, considering sites like Wigle.net exist and the Google Street view cars were designed to capture all SSID data (they hired the guy who made NetStumbler, a popular open source SSID scanning tool in the early 2000's), it's trivial to get within a few hundred feet with just a few SSID's in an area. When your neighbor has an SSID of Comcast-12345 (aka random string), there is probably only one location that has your SSID and the Comcast one in the same location. You can change your SSID every day, but your neighbors probably don't change theirs.
Oh thats easy, android uses ( or at least used it in the past ) these services for location.
Android will first try gps to get your location. However, gps needs direct connection to a satellite and can easily be either turned off or not working correctly.
It then tries to triangulate your location using cell towers and their location, which gives a rough estimate on your location.
Then it scans SSID's that are near to hone down some more on your location, and its this step that needs that data.
Edit: it used to also scan, and save, SSID names with a rough estimate location to fill and update this database. I say used to, cause thats how it worked circa 2009, so idk how it works nowadays
How much is that shit? You can snort it, right?