In an interesting presentation at the Black Hat security conference, Samy Kamkar presented a web attack that can locate you within 30 feet. Precisely. Going to a web site with the appropriate JavaScript and Ajax code, you won’t see anything, but the web site will recover your router’s MAC address (a unique address given to all network devices), then use Google street view data to connect that MAC address with your precise location. Since Google’s photo cars recorded MAC addresses, and this information is publicly available, the MAC address can be correlated with the location where it was detected. In many cases, this can be very precise, especially if you’re in a sparsely populated area.
There are some caveats: the router has to not have had its default login and password changed, and you have to live in an area that has been mapped by Google street view.
You can see a video of the demonstration here.
