On 04.09.2014, at 03:12 , Felix Baumann <[email protected]> wrote: > There are a few reasons why the export is limited to cells: > 1) the bssid/mac exposes the company that produced the product and maybe even > the product type, which is bad. > If MLS would offer this data for download, then attackers could filter a > region for vulnerable routers (vulnerable for certain exploits) > MLS would be more accurate than shodan…
That isn’t actually our primary concern. The main problem is that the combination of a mac address, timestamp and location is regarded as personal data in some countries. Publishing this data without the consent of the owner of the WiFi network would violate the privacy of that person. That’s why we have the “you need to know two” restriction for WiFi networks and beyond that filter out too similar mac addresses in an attempt to detect WiFi equipment with multiple logical networks. We need to make sure you cannot track the movements or whereabouts of one person / device. We have discussed various schemes on this mailing list in the past to use additional knowledge or cryptography to secure the data enough for export purposes. But so far none of the approaches have been convincing. > 2) if there are less observations at one place then this data could expose a > stumbler's home/working place or whatever (privacy concerns) Based on what we learned in the past year, raw observation data contains too many ways to reconstruct the movements of the people contributing and collecting data and we don’t see any way to share it publicly. The only way to share it, would be to ask each contributor to opt-into sharing their location / stumbling history publicly. To protect the privacy of the WiFi owners, we still had to restrict this to only cell data. Overall I think it makes more sense to have multiple projects with different policies in this space. If you want to share your personal stumbling history, you can for example contribute to the OpenCellID project, and via our data exchange still benefit MLS. If you want your stumbling history to be protected, MLS might be the more appropriate project. Hanno _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
