Google made some changes in the way locations of millions of smartphones, laptops and other devices connected to Wi-Fi connections are shared after people complaint about privacy concerns. The search giant remained silent with regards to the issue, unlike its daily updates about its new Google+ social network. 
Researchers view this refusal by Google to tackle the issue of geolocation database as a challenge. This led them to investigate how the limitations work. One of the researchers is Samy Kamkar, who made a web page that would allow users to look up a street address of any device’s Wi-Fi hardware address and to see if it’s in Google’s database. Kamkar said that Google blocked his IP address last month to prevent queries from his server. He has already reconfigured his server to bypass Google’s ban.
If you knew someone’s Wi-Fi address, you can use Google’s geolocation web service to look for their home address or work address. But the search giant discontinued it late last June. It was reported that Google’s database were updated a few hours later, which makes it possible to follow a person. Google designed the database to give its users a faster wait to determine their locations than with GPS alone.
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