wigle.net suppresses Mitsubishi Outlander Wi-Fi hits

I was both impressed and a bit surprised to see that the awesome war driving database web site https://wigle.net has made an announcement related to our work on the Mitsubishi Outlander.

First, kudos to wigle for taking the manufacturers request seriously. Mitsubishi made an interesting choice of Wi-Fi for mobile app-to-car communications and are working hard to resolve the issues this created.

One of the consequences of this choice was that users Outlanders are trackable using war driving databases.

You’ve no doubt seen the rest of our ‘hack’ – where one can disable the  theft alarm etc

I’ve messaged wigle to find out more about how Mitsubishi approached them. Hopefully it was a friendly and reasonable request. One which, in their shoes, I think I would have accommodated.

The downside

I’m not aware of wigle having previously agreed to suppress results from their searches. I could easily be wrong though. Does this create an interesting precedent and issue?

Here’s my dilemma:

All I need to do to become invisible from wigle searches is simply change my SSID to the same format as a Mitsubishi Outlander.

It’s REMOTEnnaaaa – where n is a lower case letter and a is a number

My home access point, the office APs, tethering APs etc etc  – they’re already pretty generic SSIDs that would be hard to find from the wider ‘noise’ in the wigle database, but now I can make then INVISIBLE from searches!

Hmmm.