For good reason! There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is.
Yeah, the message could be made clearer about what's actually being allowed, but in the end I'm glad it's there. Maybe a generic system for when you request a permission being able to provide an explanation string or something. I know some apps made a pop-up before the prompt but I found that rather verbose especially when it was incredibly obvious why they needed the permission.
> There's many online services where you can put in a wifi MAC and pretty much know within 100M where someone is.
Minor nitpick, it’s the BSSID that’s used to lookup the location. In some cases the BSSID is the same as the MAC address (usually with cheaper consumer gear), but it’s not the case with APs that are broadcasting (or have capability to broadcast) more than one SSID. As one example, think of APs that have “Home” and “Guest” separate networks.
Google is far from the only one to have that dataset. Apple has one, too, for example, as does Skyhook. And Mozilla ( https://location.services.mozilla.com/ ).
Yeah, the message could be made clearer about what's actually being allowed, but in the end I'm glad it's there. Maybe a generic system for when you request a permission being able to provide an explanation string or something. I know some apps made a pop-up before the prompt but I found that rather verbose especially when it was incredibly obvious why they needed the permission.