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Comment by lights0123 | Hacker News Reader

BSSIDs of nearby WiFi networks that are compared to lists sent by mobile devices with real GPS

I don't think the BSSIDs are sent using the HTML5 location service.

Instead your computer operating system sends the BSSIDs to another service, get the location back and then your browser uses this location service to send a lat,long to the requesting website.

See https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mh35873/mac and https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-location...

And if I don't even have a wifi card?

Then you represent a trivially small fraction of users. My desktop doesn't have wifi either, but most modern motherboards come with a wifi card built in. Not to mention the majority of visitors to mainstream sites are on mobile and a good chunk of the rest are on a laptop. Also Firefox has 3% market share so we're talking about a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.

I run Qubes unless I'm doing something very performance-oriented like massively parallel workloads. So Firefox doesn't know about the builtin wifi card, which has no antenna connected, because I don't use it and it's just in the way anyway.

So yeah I have a wifi card, technically, but also technically don't from the point of view of firefox or any other program on my computer.

Most? More likely than not you will not have such a card in a mainboard.

Yes, most. Look at X470 or z590 mobos that are 2 generations old. The majority have wifi though I personally don't see the point.

Random board: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X470-AORUS-ULTRA-GAMING...

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