1177952 - Consider filtering out _nomap wifi networks in geolocation code

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: DOM: Geolocation, enhancement)

Description

[Hanno Schlichting]

As part of getting involved in building a location service on our own, we have found that these services typically offer an opt-out approach for wifi owners, by letting them specify a _nomap ssid suffix. We respect that in all of our own "stumbling" code as well.

But when we do normal geolocation lookups, we don't apply this kind of filtering. What can happen here is that we do a geolocation lookup based on wifi networks, and send that data to a location service. Since the ssid is not part of the geolocation query, the service cannot know if it should or shouldn't store information about the wifi networks present in that query. While we currently don't store data about wifi networks coming in this way in our own service, other services like Google's location service do.

I think we should change our wifi scanning code on the geolocation side, to do client side filtering and never send data for wifi networks with a _nomap suffixed wifi or one with no ssid (hidden ssid) to a geolocation service.

Comment 1

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

We already filter out _nomap SSIDs for geolocation service queries. Or are you describing something different?

I landed the _nomap filter in bug 883071 based on your suggestion in bug 882485 comment 7. :) We used to also filter "hidden" zero-length SSIDs, but that code was removed sometime. I added it back in bug 883071, but then it disappeared again in dougt's bug 882485.

https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/dom/system/NetworkGeolocationProvider.js#382

Comment 2

[Hanno Schlichting]

My bad, I looked too closely at the different wifi scanning modules, not considering that we do the filter on layer above it.