Does Stumbler also support this? If not, why not?
Ref: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632?hl=en
edit: Found the answer to my own question. Yes, they do support "nomap": https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler/issues/149
I feel very ashamed, as someone who works in IT, everytime this happens. I mean, people can opt-out, of course - but, in order to do that, they need to know what an SSID is, and how to change it. What about people who don't? Will we just assume that they don't care or that their opinion doesn't matter?
Also, what if I agree to put my SSID into an open database but not in a locked one? Apple's and Google's location databases do not compare, for me, to Mozilla's one: I am more than glad to be in the latter, but not to be in the two formers.
but that's clearly not the intention here, because how dare anyone question someone else's motives/objectives/priorities for collecting data about devices they don't own. in fact, we're supposed to think this is the "nice" version because a google-funded nonprofit is doing it instead of google doing it unlawfully with cars or through waze.
seeing mozilla move in this direction while talking about how much they respect everyone's privacy is a strategic stumble indeed.
-Sorry, is FritzBox!239?
-No, here is YouMakeTooMuchNoiseWTF
-Oh, I see, could you please pass a message to your neighbour? I'd very much appreciate if he could please fill in this form and send it back through paper mail to Mozilla…
but the premise of your comment is that of course my device's SSID and related location should be collected in someone else's database because a google-funded nonprofit wrote an app for people to go wardriving with.
just because SSIDs can be legally observed and collected doesn't mean i have to be happy about it. I wasn't talking about this as a technical problem as much as an ethical/political one for an organization that claims to be committed to my privacy...except when it's not.
i'm not making any legal claims to privacy--just pointing out that collecting everything that's lawful to collect runs counter to mozilla's policy stance of being committed to users' privacy.
I don't see your point. If you are ignorant enough to not know how to secure against such measly attempts at privacy breach, how will you secure against a more determined hacker?
Further more the SSID is publicly broadcast, so that any device you authorized can identify and connect.
my point was that this approach to data collection, consent, and privacy sharply and directly contradicts claims mozilla makes to users about being committed to their privacy. i think this reflects the opposite.
maybe a better analogy would be someone from the ACLU photographing everyone they saw in public: legal and easy to defend against, but hypocritical/not cool in my opinion and it might make me question the organization's priorities.
It has been understood for awhile now that you have no expectation of privacy in public, at least as far as not being photographed, talked to, etc. Most people would probably agree that the paparazzi taking sneaky pictures of celebrities buying milk at Kroger aren't being very classy, but they'll also probably say it's fair game at that point.
Likewise, I would argue that broadcasting your SSID over the electromagnetic spectrum is public. As far as privacy is concerned (I have a slightly different opinion when it comes to security) I still haven't seen any compelling argument explaining how having your SSID mapped to a location is an any way a violation of privacy. Maybe you have one?
One hypothetical example: SSIDs often betray vendor names out of the box, and home routers are typically embedded devices that don't frequently receive security updates. Suppose Mozilla makes its database public and lists my SSID--or more likely, some weakly-secure hash of my SSID--in a public database that later gets compromised (e.g. plenty of people know their own SSIDs). Then, through no fault of Mozilla's, there's some 0day announced for my router. Now, every script kiddie in the neighborhood's using metasploit against a pre-selected list of vulnerable routers, potentially even remotely depending on their ability to integrate information from other sources. Maybe that sounds like more of a security issue than a privacy issue, but at some point, the effect is the same.
I'm still interested in seeing an example of how linking SSIDs to physical locations is a violation of privacy. Especially compared to, say, linking my full legal name to my house address which is already treated as public knowledge.
Everything else is idealizing. Same as with video and with DRM. Mozilla could take a principled stance and say no to patented codes and no to DRM, and then Google says yes to both of those things, reap the benefits, while the end consumer abandon Mozilla because it doesn't play YouTube or Netflix, and then Mozilla is no more.
If you don't like it, you can fork Firefox and/or choose not to trust Mozilla. The situation is super sad, but what else can you do? Be principled and disappear? Or compromise and survive?
Don't you want everyone to observe your SSID? Hide it. You are cluttering the public's ether, so you are subject to public scrutiny. Don't you want to add "no_map" to the end of it? Shut up.
Or just do what Buckiminister Fuller told you to do: do not criticize a system but build a new and better one to obsolete the one that don't work. I promise to print your form if you start with a better approach. Unless you are not a complete idiot and understand that it is a theoretically possible way to deal with the problem but not a feasable one. Anyway, go on, just complain and talk nonsense: it will help. A lot.
as engineers, we often end up offering people choices that aren't really choices. for my grandmother's ISP-provided wi-fi access point, adding no_map to her SSID isn't a choice she's prepared to make, and i don't think those are reasonable expectations for the average user.
when people suggest otherwise, i think that part of what they seem to be arguing is that the technical problem they're trying to solve--often for commercial gain--is more important than being respectful of other people. people shouldn't have to know how to hide their SSID or add "no_map" to their SSID to stay out of large databases by default.
my view is that the world is a better place when information sharing is consensual, even when it's otherwise legal to obtain that information. i think that's a better world than one in which we tell people to hide their SSIDs or add "no_map" to them. i'm interested in building software and systems that respect people and their devices.
As for collecting your SSID information - devices are already storing SSIDs to do an active scan.
If you're not happy that the Mozilla Stumbler can record that SSID, you should probably also be unhappy that all WiFi devices capable doing a probe request - which is basically all wifi devices.
As far as the ethics concern - I'll bite.
This is one of the privacy reasons why we do not publish the wifi database yet. We haven't figured out a way to do this without exposing too much personal data yet.
We've got some rough ideas on how to do this, but nothing good enough yet that we'd be willing to expose our users to this risk.
And thank you for acknowledging privacy concerns over publishing the wifi database, although I'm personally still concerned whenever that information gets aggregated systematically, even if it's internal to Mozilla.
One way I think about privacy for data like this is respecting people's intentions. When most people set up wi-fi, I would argue that their intent is almost never to help Mozilla or Google precisely locate phones or IP addresses; it's to connect wirelessly to the internet. More to the point, it's hard to find out someone's intention without asking them. Kudos to Mozilla for getting people to wardrive consensually; but that may still not make me feel much better if I'm just someone with wi-fi.
Yup. I'm as heartbroken as I can be with a company.
A "hand-washing" attitude towards privacy from Google, Facebook or a telco is expectable. But from Mozilla? This saddens me, way more than the support of DRM in the web.
Using SSID naming conventions to do this is just dishonest: most of the people who will be scanned won't know what an SSID is. Even if they do, and do have the competence to change it, how many of them will know about this convention? More than this: how many "home network owners" know that their networks are being scanned and georeferenced? This opt-out scheme is ridiculous and plain "hand-washing" - they obviously don't expect people to use it.
I don't really care about the procedure; Snailmail, if need be. Convenience is not a valid argument for breaking privacy.
> Would the cons outwheigh the pros?
The answer to this is dependent on one's stance. As you may imagine, from where I stand, they do (clearly). I can't see any "logistical inconvenience" justify breaking privacy by default.
As far as I know, the sole use of this database is to say, "if you can see this set of wifi networks, then you are probably at this GPS location." It's literally the same thing, except at a different electromagnetic frequency, as saying "if you can see houses with these addresses, you are probably at this GPS location." Kind of like a street map.
I definitely think that privacy concerns can emerge when you aggregate public data -- is there something I'm missing here?
i know plenty of people for whom that's not a choice they're likely to know about. perhaps mozilla/google shouldn't be able to dictate my SSID or its visibility just because they don't want to incur the cost/complexity of obtaining affirmative, informed consent.
If technology perfectly reflected people's intentions for their devices, I think we'd see relatively few people deliberately broadcasting wi-fi outside of their homes intentionally and most people's SSIDs wouldn't show up on any dropdown outside their home.
I agree that this information is often available from public places, but I was getting at whose priorities should dictate whether/how the information gets collected and how it's used--people who paid for devices they may not fully understand or be able to control, or organizations that want to systematically exploit signals from them for different purposes that may be different from those of the person who owns the device?
What is it about SSID-based geolocation that compromises the AP owner’s privacy?
through no fault of mozilla's, most home routers are ridiculously, pathetically insecure. this is not a situation that would be improved by making it easier to geolocate routers from specific vendors. if vulnerable routers become easier to find, my communications passing through that router could quickly become a lot less private. would mozilla be responsible? no. but that doesn't mean mozilla sharing my probably-vulnerable router's location wouldn't play a role in compromising my privacy.
Everyone knows that someone can record the outside of your house; not everyone knows that SSIDs with location can (and actually are!) registered. Do you notice the difference? You can't assume that WLAN specifics are as tacit as knowing that people can look at my house!
Everyone who travels past your home can see if the lights are on in the evening. They can also see which lights are on in the front of the house.
So I'm going to give you three scenarios and I want you to tell me when exactly it becomes a privacy issue:
1) A single person travels past your house and happens to notice which lights are on.
2) Someone travels past your house and records, on a piece of paper, which lights are on.
3) A Google car travels past your house and records, electronically, which lights are on.
Same thing with WiFi SSIDs here. It is like you standing on the roof of your home and shouting your ATM pin using a bullhorn, then complaining when someone else hears or records the information.
You want people to stop "monitoring" your SSID? Stop freaking broadcasting it at all.
> You want people to stop "monitoring" your SSID? Stop freaking broadcasting it at all.
This is technocentrical BS, washing the hands to justify doing what you want.
1) Most people don't know that their SSIDs are being recorded (with position), so how do you expect them to make an informed decision? It's not like the information is readily available (I work in IT and I did not know about appending "no_map" to the SSID).
2) Everyone has a router, broadcasting the SSID. Do you really and honestly expect everyone to know how to disable it?
Just hand waving and "we don't have to explain ourselves, privacy is the default state!"
I gave an analogy above, you didn't even answer it. When does it become a privacy issue exactly?
You see, that's the problem - and that's the point. I did not answer because:
a) I don't really care about my SSID privacy. I do, however, care about other people right to know what's happening and to make informed (not implicit, by Google or Mozilla rules) decisions; and
b) I really don't (shouldn't) have to. It's not your concern when or how I feel my privacy being violated. I don't have to answer that, and it's a sad, sad society where this happens.
Just because this information is legal to collect, doesn't mean people think a nonprofit that claims to be committed to user privacy should be moving the center of gravity closer to your third scenario.
But maybe more importantly, we're not talking about "someone else" recording the information or just a few "people" "monitoring" an SSID. We're questioning the wisdom of an organization building software to systematically collect, store, and make an SSID far more readily available to far larger numbers of people.
So you can use my access point to find your location, but if I bring it to my next home, please don't record that in public data.
So, is it fair to say that there's no privacy concern if the API only exposes a one-way lookup? I.e. "here are the access points I can see -- where am I?"
That also addresses the other concern raised below, that the database could be used to search for known-vulnerable routers.
It helps, but no. The data is still there to use. The API or Mozilla policy may change, or security may fail.
From what I can tell, there's no need to record either the devices gathering data or the devices looking up their location. Just don't store that data and everything is fine.
That could be mitigated by requiring at least two access points for a query.
If you don't want people obtaining information from a radio beacon in your house then do not put a radio beacon in your house. But don't pester companies for opting out of the passive database of radio signals you are voluntarily sending into the world. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
Furthermore, there is nothing intrinsically revealing about an SSID. If your SSID tells people information about you, the problem is the SSID and not the collection of that information. It is trivial to change your SSID to a pseudonymous one.
I know that a lot of people are not aware of the privacy consequences, but those people are not the ones making a point out of this. Once you educate yourself about the privacy consequences of using a Wi-Fi router, do not blame people for collecting information that you are actively and voluntarily broadcasting!
Having a Wi-Fi router with an SSID is the equivalent of installing a speaker on the top of your house and have it constantly spell a uniquish name to the neighborhood. It might be useful for you to have that, but you might want to think a bit about what it means for your privacy.
[1]: Not having to aim or target anything, not having to have exotic instruments, but being able to be picked up by anyone at all by just listening.
Mozilla's not aiming to do anything remotely as invasive as that, but I still don't find "anything that can be picked up passively from public property is fair game" a very compelling ethical standard, especially for an organization like Mozilla.
This is a strawman.
Any public information that can be picked up passively from public property is fair game is the real argument. Decrypting WEP, easy enough as it might be, is still unethical as the information was meant to be private. Making a database of public SSID broadcasts is completely ethical as there should be nothing private about an SSID.
This is another strawman.
I'm not arguing for a particular clear-cut definition of "public" and "private" at all. I'm arguing that the distinction public and private can be made for some forms of communication, and that a radio broadcast to your neighborhood means it is public, and encrypting your traffic means it is private. In addition to that there is also a greyer area like unencrypted traffic over a wire, that should mostly be considered private from an ethical perspective.
I agree that most people don't really know what they're doing, and I agree that it is problem. I also think that most people don't really care, and considering no information is contained in most SSIDs rightly so. Lastly I think that education is important for this, not regulation (legislative or internal) for the collecting companies or individuals. But all of that is not what I was arguing against.
The only place the SSID (clear text name) is used is in filtering out things on the client end. Both looking for "no SSID" / hidden networks and the _nomap suffix. The SSID is never sent to any service.
1) The same accessibility for a passerby outside of your house.
2) The same constant, location identifying properties or information content.
The things you mention cannot be described as beacons.
Just like you can argue that the main purpose of windows is not so that people can look in, it's so that people can look out, and light comes in.
I agree partially with what you're saying, but there is a mismatch between user expectation and what the technology actually does. I don't think the fact that the user used it implies they consented to the technical side effects.
You might jump to say "stingrays are illegal so that's different" and in some ways, you'd be right. But it's also the case that the average user's expectations about how their wireless devices will be systematically located by third parties are better codified into law and policy in that case than in this one.
IMSI catchers intercept signals broadcasted from radios that commonly transit across public property. my point was that we routinely consider things other than protocol specs in determining whether and when signals should be collected.
These are not the people I'm arguing against, and I mentioned that in my first post. People should definitely be educated about the privacy consequences of their equipment. I'm arguing against people who do know that an SSID broadcast is a public radio signal they themselves transmit, and are still arguing that other parties (Google, Mozilla) should be responsible for their privacy regarding that signal instead of themselves.
> my point was that we routinely consider things other than protocol specs in determining whether and when signals should be collected.
A radio signal that is explicitly meant to be public should be public information. A radio signal that is meant to private, but can be made public by exploitation or specialized instrumentation should not be public information almost all of the time. If the meant-to-be-public signal can be collected en masse by an app such as Mozilla's, then there's really no way people should feel any expectation of privacy in this regard.
It's hard for me to think of ways these organizations could reliably know whether people don't mind their SSID being mapped or used for related purposes without asking them.
Of course they are not making a point - they are not aware. How would you expect them to make a point?
What you saying is: if they don't know enough about the subject to decide if a point should be made, then we should ignore the right to give (or not) an informed consent (because you can decide for them if the SSID is "intrinsically revealing" or not).
Mozilla, Google (and some people in this thread) assume that it's right for them to decide if there are privacy concerns and advance with their initiatives. I don't. And they are, by marking this as opt-in, thinking for them.
If the SSID was mandated to be identical to someone's name (or any other identifying information), I'd say the problem you describe was real. But since it the information broadcast is mostly pseudonymous, I think it's quite a small thing you are arguing. If people are including personal information in their SSID, by all means tell them!
The existance of these databases mean that anyone who has unrestricted access to query the database, can probably figure out where anyone else who enters their vicinity, lives and works, completely passively.