18 Jul Apple patent application: Standardized checks for public WLAN
Open WLANs in hotels, on the train or in restaurants are practical, but not necessarily secure: you never know what will happen to your data, which is why it is always recommended to use a VPN – either via your home network or a VPN service provider. Apple now seems to be planning to use various techniques to bring more trust to the world of free Wi-Fi providers. This is the result of a new patent application that became public this week. The application was submitted under the heading “Crowd Sourced Privacy Preserving Access Point Mapping” and describes a system in which existing WLAN base stations in the vicinity are to be checked for their trustworthiness with user assistance, but in such a way that privacy is preserved. Apple describes a system in which the Wi-Fi display in iOS or on Mac will be ranked in future. Networks would be sorted according to characteristics such as “Popular”, “Suspicious”, “High quality” or “Captive” (these are networks where you have to register via a captive portal, such as hotels). To implement this, anonymized data is to be collected via the WLAN access points to which users connect. Personal information or location data should not be stored. The data and network performance are then analyzed on Apple’s servers in order to carry out the ranking.