On 22. May 2017, at 22:39, Jan-Tarek Butt <[email protected]> wrote: >> Our legal understanding is that it violates European privacy laws to release >> a dataset, which contains the combination of a BSSID and a lat/lon position. >> This combination is considered personally identifiable information. > > please could you show me the privacy laws or any references? > I didn't find much while googling. :)
I have a fairly old blog post up at http://blog.hannosch.eu/2013/12/mozilla-location-service-what-why-and.html <http://blog.hannosch.eu/2013/12/mozilla-location-service-what-why-and.html>. Skip to the "Privacy" section for the interesting bits. The best, but also very lengthy analysis is from the Dutch Data Protection Agency available at https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/sites/default/files/downloads/mijn_privacy/en_pb_20110811_google_final_findings.pdf <https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/sites/default/files/downloads/mijn_privacy/en_pb_20110811_google_final_findings.pdf>. Of particular note is section 4.3. That report is hard to read, as Google was fined for both accidentally collecting the traffic of unencrypted WiFi networks, as well as doing metadata (BSSID, lat/lon) collection. Most of the report covers the former. In the US there were cases against Google for wiretapping charges, which covered the first offense. The metadata collection was to my knowledge not investigated or might not be illegal in the US. Several bills proposed to Congress/the Senate to regulate location privacy in the US never made it past the draft state. As detailed in my blog post, there was a media hype around location privacy topics during those years. The industry standard of "you need to know two nearby" WiFi networks got established as a result, as well as the "_nomap" opt-out approach. The combination of those two satisfied the Dutch DPA, and it allowed geolocation services to continue to be operated. They have some more news articles on their site about this, search for "Google WiFi" on https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/en <https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/en>. Cheers, Hanno _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
