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Mozilla Is Mapping Cell Towers and WiFi Access Points
First time accepted submitter neiras writes "Mozilla is building a map of publicly-observable cell tower and WiFi access points to compete with proprietary geolocation services like Google's. Coverage is a bit thin so far but is improving rapidly. Anyone with an Android phone can help by downloading the MozStumbler app and letting it run while walking or driving around. The application is also available on the F-Droid market." "Thin" is relative; it's quite a few data points since we first mentioned the pilot program a few months ago.
If I recall correctly, the main thing that got Google in trouble was that they were actually intercepting information sent through unsecured access points in addition to mapping out access points in general.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
>What's the point of this?
RTFS, geolocation.
>Didn't the FTC fine Google for this kind of activity?
No, they got fined for a different aspect.
what, storing intercepted wifi traffic instead of just the ssid? I doubt they'd forget that one.
I'd say this is especially an issue with so little data currently.
I can currently narrow out individuals in my neighbourhood, the paths they took from their houses (which I can narrow down to about one of 6 addresses in two caes i'm looking at) to the local shopping center, to another persons house (friend, relative - unsure but it'd help identify the individual), and back to their house in this case.
If I got the complete data with timestamps, I could easily and completely filter out individual trips without a shadow of a doubt - which would help identify individuals even more so with the current level of data.
I hope the data becomes saturated soon, because as it stands there are literally about 30 people in my entire state (ACT, AU) being tracked - for most of which I can see where they like to walk/ride (which rivers/paths/tracks), where they shop, where their friends/relatives are, where they work for some of them (some areas are just business complexes), and if I could figure out the frequency of data transmission - along some motor ways I can even figure out how fast they're driving based on the dispersal pattern of data points.
This is a SERIOUS privacy issue.
openBmap, anyone?
Its a frequent problem with these phone based mapping programs, that the coverage area they map is way too small, especially when they are mapping cell towers. They usually assume a reception circle about the width of a road. So they end up mapping roads, and frequently apply magical thinking to show no coverage areas simply because nobody walked there running their app.
They will show coverage on all sides of an open field, but unless someone walks a zigzags path thru that field they will simply assume there is no coverage there. I prefer carrier maps. Even guesswork by real radio engineers is better than spotwork by silly apps.
These mapping programs, when mapping cellular service would be better off mapping HOLES (no coverage areas) of each type (2g, 3G, LTE, CDMA, etc). The task would be smaller, and the data presentation far more useful. They would just log GPS position where there was no signal and send that when they again found a signal. Presentation would show service available until you actually had some measurements that said it wasn't.
That way at least the farmer or hunter working off road would have a more reliable idea of where there is likely cell service, and everybody would have a better idea of where they are unlikely to service.
Assuming it is all quiet in the forest when trees fall simply because you weren't standing there to hear it is a interesting philosophical exercise but a pretty stupid way to run a mapping service.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You are right, of course, it merely follows people, it says nothing of signal paths, and can't distinguish no-signal areas from un-visited areas.
And showing a map when there are so few participants is pretty silly.
For cell reception, this is useless.
For wifi mapping, this is redundant.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Presumably they do it so that they can support the HTML5 Geolocation API. And, FWIW, HTML5 Geolocation is opt-in on every request, at least in the context of general web browsing.
I've found that HTML5 geolocation is more accurate using Wifi than cell towers or even GPS. Cell towers don't give very accurate results because cellphones and tablets don't actually triangulate your position like they might do with GPS. GPS sucks because people are inside most time, and also the GPS receiver chipsets in cellphones suck compared to those in dedicated handsets.
Can you really help intercepting it in some fashion if you're mapping networks? What you can help is storing it afterwards. It should have been discarded in microseconds, not months.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'm opting out of this whole WiFi mapping thing.
Hopefully they run into the same issue that Google did.
Large location based advertising revenue? A global world road map with radio-location markers that exceeds many commercial cartographers' efforts? Which issue were you thinking of?
Yes, for a fairly broad definition of yes anyway. There's no need to ever actually connect to any network to map them, just slurp up SSID broadcasts, maybe channel and signal strength. There is no reason to ever write any traffic to non-volatile storage.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
icebike, If you had bothered read the Mozilla Location Service Project Page, the goal of the project is to create an Open Wifi AP/Cell Tower to Geo Location Mapping Database, It's not meant to map Cell Coverage. https://location.services.mozilla.com/
This will allow the look up of rough position information without turning on the GPS using an OPEN DATABASE. The same thing that a few PROPRIETARY databases do currently.
Given this goal, road coverage is good enough.
Maybe the one where they've got so much money that they can drop $3.2bn on a thermostat company and count it as an operating expense?
I've been doing this for a few months. I can see the trip I took over New Years week down the California coast and then across to Death Valley and up to Lake Tahoe. I don't care that people can see my track (I spent some time in Los Osos and Morrow Bay and you can clearly see my routes in that area).
I assume that the NSA also has my route from tracking my cell phone.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I think one purpose of this is to help refine GPS position. If you know the locations of SSIDs then you can get a better location. No need to access the WiFi.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Actually, it's to... provide an alternative locating service to GPS.
Both Apple and Google maintain a list of WiFi MAC addresses and GPS locations. In areas where there's no GPS, or GPS is extremely weak, using cell tower and MAC addresses can provide alternative location services. Or for devices without GPS hardware, it can provide location services still. E.g., if you tether a WiFi-only iPad to an iPhone, it can get your location quite accurately using the database.
Apple bought a company that maintains the database, Google built theirs up using streetview. Mozilla is probably trying to create an open-source version.
And it's that database that lead to the whole "tracking" scandal of iOS 4 - because whenever you requested a location Apple sends you a database containing locations near you as well so you can do mapping without continually asking Apple where it is. That database cache was what people said "Apple is tracking them!" Of course, it wasn't, but knowing what areas the cache covers helps in knowing where you might be. In densely populated areas with a lot of APs, Apple would send you a very narrow list that can be quite accurate to your track. In areas with more sporadic coverage, you get a bigger footprint because there's less data per square mile (Apple probably sends you a fixed number of APs to locate oneself, rather than send you all the APs within a certain radius).
So in the city, you can get down to street-level tracking. In the suburbs, well, the cache is probably only good for pinpointing to a few blocks.
You don't need to 'connect' to them but IIRC there is some benefit to looking at the traffic beyond mere broadcasts. IE if you can see device X sending traffic to Y you can begin to imply the position of Y even if you can't see it that device yourself because it's too far away from you.
A <------ X <-------> Y
Moz might not be doing that and perhaps it isn't a "need" but if the goal is to get the best data it's not correct to say that deeper analysis than mere SSID broadcast doesn't have benefits. Of course if you are looking deeper then you should be paying attention to any possible privacy implications and avoiding recording anything that could be considered 'content'.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
http://sensorly.com/
Has already done much of what this project is wanting to accomplish
I hope you die painfully and alone.
Completely. This just looks for the 'announcement' packets from access points. It doesn't care or do anything about the data packets.
You are intercepting data just as much as your phone does when you go to the wifi page and it shows the list of access points near by.
Google was accidentally storing all the raw data for debug purposes (which got left turned on).
Also, GPS kills batteries. A quick network lookup (or even local, since you could cache the local area's data and request new data only when you move enough) is cheap on the battery.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Yelp. Google Maps. Foursquare. Whatever. All written in HTML5.
IE, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all already support Wifi geolocation. Firefox does, too, actually, but Mozilla probably doesn't like the price they're paying their third-party vendor.
Geolocation for what though?
Say I go to google maps, or mapquest, or openstreetmap, or whatever. That web page will ask the browser to do geolocation, the browser will throw up a dialog something like this:
Website foo-maps.bar wants to know your location.
{Scare-text explaining why I might not want to click OK}
Send location data?
[Yes] [No]
If I click yes, the browser sends my location to the mapping site. Now I'm looking at a map of where I am, I can search for businesses nearby, etc.. Or, if I don't want a map of my current location, I could just click no, then I'd have to type in an address or search query to find the map I do want.
Or some ad server wants to show me banner ads for nearby stores, so it asks the browser to geolocation; the browser will throw up the same dialog, I'll click no, and the ad server doesn't get my location.
Or any other web site that might want to know my location for any reason, same story: The browser pops up a dialog, I click yes or no, and the site gets or doesn't get my current location.
and if I could figure out the frequency of data transmission
LOL your not trying, Google: frequency finder
But then they could catch on and use a cell phone jammer http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/12/10/cell-phone-jamming/
I was in traffic court this week (normal part of driving for me) and noticed they had a jammer in use (keeps cell phones from ringing during court).
.
Also to improve GeoIP: If they connect to the WiFi, know the IP it uses to get to Google servers. Then they can provide the most probable location data back when some device on that IP asks for location information.
signature is pants
An open database for position estimation *without* GPS.
If you have a working GPS signal (well, technically three+ signals from the birds), you already know where you are.
When you record your known position as well as the BSSIDs and cell towers, and the signal strengths that you are seeing, when someone else in the future queries the database with "I'm seeing these BSSIDs and those cell towers, where the hell am I?" the database can give an answer. Kind of like GPS, but without the need to see the sky and with less battery drain on your device.
just point them to google maps, which takes advantage of android coarse location services already
http://xkcd.com/407/
How is this any different from the OpenSignalMaps project?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You are right, of course, it merely follows people, it says nothing of signal paths, and can't distinguish no-signal areas from un-visited areas.
If trilateration signal in a given area is marginal, the data collection should mark the area as marginal. If marginal area surrounds unvisited area, one can be fairly confident that the border is between a visited area and a no-signal area.
For wifi mapping, this is redundant
Not if Mozilla plans to make the data available to the public under terms more permissive than the WiGLE EULA. It could be an example of what Google's Greg Stein called "license pressure".
I'm just gonna throw this out here but maybe the reason it always seems that no one gives a shit about your suggestions or improvements is because you do actually talk to everyone here and treat them like they are a 3rd grader. Maybe if you didn't just immediately start tearing someone's idea apart and pointing out every little scenario of why it is garbage, then just maybe people would pay more attention. When I have a know-it-all wanna-be like you just start poppin off at the mouth, I ignore you.....kind of like a screaming 3rd grader.
how is mozilla going to "compete" with something that's already second to none, comes pre-installed on android handsets, and is free to use with no intrusive ads?
By making it available on Firefox OS handsets and on those Android devices that don't ship with Google Play Services, such as Kindle Fire series, several devices popular in China, and phones with CyanogenMod system software installed that don't have the Gapps.
That is going to be of limited use though. There is a good but less than 100% chance that the AP is stationary, There is a good bit less chance the thing it is talking to are stationary.
There is more safety in sticking with beacon packets as well. It's really hard to claim that a beacon was meant to be private.
If you tether a Wifi only iPad to an iPhone, you can use the GPS on the iPhone to find out where you are...
ans you get stuck looking for ok button !
Rich
so, is there an app for n9 to contribute ? :)
Rich
Google was storing all the raw data.
Fixed that for you.
Why the Google ad broker propaganda? One doesn't accidentally store such an amount of data for such an amount of time. End of. Don't echo their propaganda like some idiot fanboy.
Indeed, your device probably does it already, to present you a list of available networks.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I do hope they realize this isn't legal in quite a few countries. Since combining WiFi AP mac addresses, SSIDs and geographical location can be used to locate people that make use of these APs, some countries legally treat this information as private, even though it can be "freely acquired from a public road". Google has been having legal trouble in several European countries for this already and I don't think Mozilla would want to have the same thing happen to them.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
hmm... fair enough :-)
The individuals in your neighbourhood walk around with access points? That must be a very unusual neighbourhood. Most people who have an access point just put it somewhere stationary.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
whoa! 2005 is so gonna blow my mind!
And while Google are obviously willing to license usage of this to some extent (e.g., Presto-Opera's geolocation used the Google coarse location API), relying on licensing something from a third party (and one whom is frequently a competitor, given the number of markets Google are now in) is risky, especially given Google has fairly aggressively deprecated APIs before, at times without replacement.
I still question how useful this really is. Given that I generally have to replace my Wi-Fi Router/WAP every couple of years, often changing my SSID when I do. If this isn't constantly getting updated, then it would seem that its essentially useless as soon as a certain percentage of SSIDs change.
Google owns all the location addresses in the world. Yelp holds a much smaller subset. I care less for WiFi location capability (everyone has a GPS) than I do for being able to look something up.
The data is not available, this is only for Mozilla own usage and they don't even know if they want to publish the data at one point (not even a sample data set). This project is as close as Google or Apple, the only difference is that this time its Mozilla who is in charge, and they just say "hey we also provide a free API" (so this why they call it open
GPS is everywhere on Earth except the poles. Where is there no GPS? The problem with GPS on phones is the processing power required to figure out your location. The only place you may lose GPS is in areas with something blocking the signal, like large buildings.
To be fair, they also provide the sources for their client/server parts... But yes, otherwise it is as close as Google. Contribute to opencellid.org , instead (or in addition).
GPS can take a while to get a fix if it has been some time or distance since last turned on.
Having an accurate location from a known WiFi spot can help the GPS get its bearings faster.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I think you are misunderstanding what I meant. In my example "Y" was the stationary AP, you as "A" can't see any packets from it directly because you are out of range, but you can see data being sent by "X" to "Y" (as "X" is in range of both you and "Y"). As I understand it by looking at the packets being sent to "Y" from "X" you can know enough about "Y" to add it to your geolocation data even if you haven't observed any data from it directly.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
That could be somewhat useful, but would be a much lower precision so would need to be noted a such.
What's the point of this?
So they can sell your location to advertisers?
I know for a fact that Mozilla doesn't want to do that, it's stated in the project goals. The point is that it's eays to find out location without having to turn onf/have access to a GPS.
Who ever modded you down, is a moron. What possible use is knowing this data unless it is to spy upon people? When a business collects data on a person's habits, it is spying. When a government does the same thing, it is called spying. When an person does this, it is called, "Stalking." Cell towers are registered with the government. Wifi's are a service purchased from ISP's. I can't image anyone standing up in a crowd to say, "Ya, I told Mozilla to collect this data."
If Mozilla wants to get into the Cell Tower business, maybe they should state their intentions?
Given that the data is being collected by Mozilla, the use of this data would be "useful" for what? Mozilla charter is web browser software, not telecommunicatios.
RTFA or at least RTFS
t would seem that its essentially useless as soon as a certain percentage of SSIDs change.
Then you map it again. It's not that hard especially if it works ok for ~2 years, and you manage to get an installed base during that time. Every time a phone says "i can see X Y Z", and Z isn't in the DB you will now that Z is near X Y.
Considering how easy it is to map APs I don't see why they should have to care about _nomap.. I don't see why you would want opt out.
I have RTFA, but don't hold that against me.
If one needs to interface to the internet, would knowing where an access point be useful? One either has access or doesn't. If you don't, then move till you do.
Now if Mozilla wants to get into the Cell Tower, WiFi business, then their actions make sense. All Cell Towers are registerd with the government. WiFi's are registered with their various ISP providers. So Mozilla can't go to those folks that supply this service and ask? Why? Is it some big scarey secret? But Mozilla has not stated that this is their intention. If Mozilla were that damn interested, then go to Ericsson Int in Irvine California and ask. They are the ones that do this for a living.
You're obviously new to SlashDot, Here, "reality" is a word on a vocabulary test, and nothing more.
Perhaps once on the mozilla map page (linked in TFS) you might have selected Project overview to see what they had in mind if it wasn't yet clear.
The telecomms industry isn't well known for being at all helpful even when being paid.
You obviously also didn't look at my UID :-)