I used to work at Mozilla until recently and what you're talking about is nonsense. The telemetry data is handled extremely carefully. Any downstream use of that data is also carefully managed so that creating re-identifiable data is not possible.
Could Mozilla reidentify people with raw telemetry - sure. Is it easy or done in practice - no. Shut the hell up unless you know better than someone who has handled that data.
Seriously folks - Mozilla has problems - but proper handling of your private data is not one of them.
geo-fencing was extremely rarely used. I think we had single digit numbers of people who enabled the feature and understood what it meant.
We decided to cut out geofencing because it was confusing to most people and reducing the number of knobs and dials on a program is usually a good thing.
Hey, we're happy to hear about privacy concerns and ways that these might be addressed.
As for collecting your SSID information - devices are already storing SSIDs to do an active scan.
If you're not happy that the Mozilla Stumbler can record that SSID, you should probably also be unhappy that all WiFi devices capable doing a probe request - which is basically all wifi devices.
As far as the ethics concern - I'll bite.
This is one of the privacy reasons why we do not publish the wifi database yet. We haven't figured out a way to do this without exposing too much personal data yet.
We've got some rough ideas on how to do this, but nothing good enough yet that we'd be willing to expose our users to this risk.
I'm going to try getting an F-Droid build out today, but we've got some build issues with the fdroidserver. In any case - it will get to F-Droid real-soon-now.
One of the driving motivations was simplicity for developers and get a reasonable out-of-the-box experience.
This comes from a couple things.
Go compiles to a single static library so you don't have to worry about having dozens of "the right" library installed on your machine. Grab the heka binary and run with it.
This greatly eases our operations work as we have fewer dependency conflicts to deal with when we push things to production.
Skyhook basically owns triangulation of rf. It's absurd.