[crankycoder1975]

Hey, we're happy to hear about privacy concerns and ways that these might be addressed.

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This is one of the privacy reasons why we do not publish the wifi database yet.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

[justcommenting]

"devices are already storing SSIDs to do an active scan" - Not mine, although I would readily acknowledge that I'm in the minority and this is generally a truism.

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.

[cpeterso]

Just to clarify, the Mozilla Stumbler apps looks at SSIDs (to filter out "_nomap" and known mobile phone and transportation networks), but the SSIDs are not reported to the Mozilla Location Service. The BSSID/MAC addresses are, though.