-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.
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This is one of the privacy reasons why we do not publish the wifi database yet.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.
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.
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.
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.
