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Comment by chdir | Hacker News Reader

Could someone explain the privacy implications of mapping Wifi networks to GPS co-ordinates. Is it an opt-out thing?

A stumbler user's identity or location could be revealed by tracing routes from published GPS data or maps. In areas without much stumbler data coverage, you can see clear routes along highways and some residential streets.

Owners of Wi-Fi access points, including mobile phones with sharing Wi-Fi, may not want their unique BSSID/MAC address and location published. This is not exactly comparable to the Google Wi-Fi case in Germany. In addition to recording BSSID/MAC addresses, Google was (inadvertently?) logging Wi-Fi payload data that included cleartext user data.

btw, here's a zoomable map of the Mozilla Location Service's data coverage. Please help fill in the blanks! :)

https://location.services.mozilla.com/map

About that map, a feature I would like is to fade spots which were scanned long time ago because WiFi access points might not last as long as cell towers. This way, as a contributor, I know in which areas to scan and, as a regular user, I know that the data for a specific area might be too old.

That's a good idea. The Stumbler app shows the coverage map (as blue clouds) on your mobile device, so you can see which individual streets are yet to be stumbled. Right now, our database is small and young enough that rescanning old data is not a high priority.

Well, Google's problem was that they chose an easily implemented solution - capture everything that looks even remotely like wifi and then physically ship the HDDs to Mt.View for analysis. It just so happens that the easy solution is sometimes blatantly illegal for incredibly obvious reasons.

Stumbler seems to anonymize the data on your device before sending it, which is the way it should be done. There is no reason to transmit any sort of wifi data except the AP's MAC address.

See my post below for some answers; I was writing as you posted yours ...

Thanks. As a follow-up, there are existing services that already have this database. So why build another one? Is it because the existing ones aren't open source?

There are a number of other location databases, such as OpenCellID and WiGLE. There are issues around incompatible data licenses for some location databases. Mozilla and OpenCellID have worked together to exchange data going forward. WiGLE's Wi-Fi and cell tower databases is only available for purchase with a commercial license, even though much of the data is collected by volunteer contributors.

The combined Mozilla + OpenCellID cell tower location database is public domain and published hourly here:

https://location.services.mozilla.com/downloads

Mozilla's Wi-Fi location database is not currently published until we can solve the privacy concerns.

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