Questions about Mozilla Stumbler ??

[VJAdam]

Hi Friends ,
This is Adam From Villupuram, Im Firefox Student Ambassadors in Mozilla.
So I have a question About Mozilla Stumbler, Please Someone Clarify it?

1) First thing why we are telling to the users to Change to MozillaFirefox
Browser
Becoz MozillaFirefox browser is a Free and OpenSource Software. made for
all the platforms. it is open, so all over the worldwide people can
contribute, *Privacy is Safed. *

2) Second thing is MozillaStumbler is a Client-side Application for Android
etc,
Mozilla Stumbler will marks the WIFI,GPS,Cell Towers, Each Steps of Users
Travel.
So What does it mean, the *user is Lossing the Privacy *Know, Why we are
fighting against the Surveillance and privacy of Each Internet Users in the
World.
But the Mozilla Stumbler is Against the Privacy Know.

Please reply for my Questions..........

Thanking You,

With Regards,
Adam.

[Akshay S Dinesh]

Hi Adam,

You've raised a deep question indeed, and one that you'll have to answer to
many privacy conscious persons.

I believe the answer is that Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Stumbler are two
apps with very different purposes. While Firefox is a browser designed to
be used by anyone in the world, Stumbler is an app hand-crafted to be used
by volunteers with the only purpose being collecting location data for
seeding Mozilla Location Service.

We should be careful when any app is collecting location of its user.
Granular location data is one of the key components of surveillance.
Recently, someone had written about how the location data accessible from
Facebook messenger while chatting with your friend can be used to stalk on
your friends. [0] We should indeed be worried about any such centralized
data collection and GNU has a nice article on how detrimental surveillance
can be to a democracy and why. [1]

[0]:
https://medium.com/@arankhanna/stalking-your-friends-with-facebook-messenger-9da8820bd27d
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html

So, why is Stumbler not something to be worried about? Because
* It is to be used by volunteers who know exactly what it does.
* We have complete control over what data is collected, how long, when, etc.
* We have complete control over whether to send the data that is collected
to Mozilla or not.
* It is completely anonymized (if you want to)
* As always, it is an open-source app which makes it difficult for sneaking
some data across to Mozilla servers even if we try.

And then, we have all the benefits that Mozilla Location Service will be
able to provide with all this data we voluntarily submit. [2]

We should also be acknowledging the right of WiFi owners for their privacy.
And this has been taken care of by having an easy way to opt out of being
stumbled [3] and follows examples established by others.

[2]: https://location.services.mozilla.com/
[3]: https://location.services.mozilla.com/optout

I'm sure the people in geolocation will have more information to add.

Akshay

--
Akshay S Dinesh
https://mozillians.org/u/asdofindia/

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[Achyuth kp]

Response inline. Just few comments.

On 19 Jun 2015 22:41, "Akshay S Dinesh" <asdof...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Adam,
>
> You've raised a deep question indeed, and one that you'll have to answer
to
> many privacy conscious persons.
>
> I believe the answer is that Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Stumbler are two
> apps with very different purposes. While Firefox is a browser designed to
> be used by anyone in the world, Stumbler is an app hand-crafted to be used
> by volunteers with the only purpose being collecting location data for
> seeding Mozilla Location Service.
>
> We should be careful when any app is collecting location of its user.
> Granular location data is one of the key components of surveillance.
> Recently, someone had written about how the location data accessible from
> Facebook messenger while chatting with your friend can be used to stalk on
> your friends. [0] We should indeed be worried about any such centralized
> data collection and GNU has a nice article on how detrimental surveillance
> can be to a democracy and why. [1]
>
> [0]:
>
https://medium.com/@arankhanna/stalking-your-friends-with-facebook-messenger-9da8820bd27d
> [1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html
>
> So, why is Stumbler not something to be worried about? Because
> * It is to be used by volunteers who know exactly what it does.

Agreed. But are you entirely sure that every single user of the app is a
volunteer? I highly doubt it.
Also, what if they knew how to access said data and use it for the wrong
reasons then I'm a little worried.

> * We have complete control over what data is collected, how long, when,
etc.
> * We have complete control over whether to send the data that is collected
> to Mozilla or not.
> * It is completely anonymized (if you want to)
> * As always, it is an open-source app which makes it difficult for
sneaking
> some data across to Mozilla servers even if we try.
>
> And then, we have all the benefits that Mozilla Location Service will be
> able to provide with all this data we voluntarily submit. [2]
>
> We should also be acknowledging the right of WiFi owners for their
privacy.
> And this has been taken care of by having an easy way to opt out of being
> stumbled [3] and follows examples established by others.

Sadly, not many people know about this process. There may be a lot of
people who wouldn't like the idea of having their WiFi stumbled upon.

[Akshay S Dinesh]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 10:53 PM, Achyuth kp <achyu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Agreed. But are you entirely sure that every single user of the app is a
> volunteer? I highly doubt it.
>

Of course there might be people who do not know what they're doing and
Stumble (like they play Ingress). But at least, we're compensating by
anonymizing the data collected.

> Also, what if they knew how to access said data and use it for the wrong
> reasons then I'm a little worried.
>

I do not completely understand this sentence. Who are "they" here? And what
wrong reasons?

[Achyuth kp]

*Regards*
*Achyuth K.P.*
*Mozilla Rep - India* <https://reps.mozilla.org/u/achyuthkp/>
*Webmaker Super Mentor*
*Mozilla India*

On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 9:49 AM, Akshay S Dinesh <asdof...@gmail.com>
wrote:

I wasn't referring to anything specific. I was merely making a general
point of anyone (using the app) having access to the data. And yes, since
the data collected has anonymity, I suppose it really isn't an issue. So
you can ignore this comment.