Mozilla Ends its Privacy-Friendly GPS-Style Location Service

Mozilla Location Service offered "a free, open way to offer GPS-style location detection features" for developers on devices without GPS hardware, remembers the Linux blog OMG Ubuntu. It used signals like Wi-Fi access points and Bluetooth beacons "without any of the privacy implications most competing geolocation services have."

But Friday they reported that Mozilla "has announced it is ending access to Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which provides accurate, privacy-respecting, and crowdsourced geolocation data." Developers and 3rd-party projects that use MLS to detect a users' location, such as the freedesktop.org location framework GeoClue, which is used by apps like GNOME Maps and Weather, have only a few months left to continue using the service... In late March, POST data submissions will return 403 responses. Finally, on June 12, all 3rd-party API keys will be removed and MLS data only accessible by Mozilla...

MLS' accuracy has declined in recent years. Patent infringement claims in 2019 saw Mozilla reach a settlement to avoid litigation. As part of that settlement it was forced to make changes to MLS that impacted its ability to invest in (commercially exploit?) and improve the service.
The article notes that GeoClue "already supports multiple location detection methods, including IP-based ones," so it should continue operating.

"But the sad reality is that there just aren't a lot of free, open, privacy-friendly, accurate, and (rather importantly for a framework built in to Linux desktops) reliable alternatives to Mozilla Location Services, which has built up a colossal 'signal map' from which to pinpoint locations."

"We are grateful for the contributions of the community to MLS to both the code and the dataset," a Mozilla senior engineering manager said in a statement.

Re:Killedbymozilla

[Quantum gravity]

Chrome come from a company that makes money from advertisement. Firefox doesn't and gives users better privacy.

Re:

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I've become a bit disillusioned with Firefox as of late and have been using Brave.

It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good in my humble opinion. Give it a try and see what you think.

Re:Killedbymozilla

[KiloByte]

Firefox is much better than Brave in privacy related matters -- while Brave is heavily patched, it's built upon a browser specifically made to breach privacy. Brave's authors can trivially disable phoning home or FLoC cookies, but they can't as easily add infrastructure that isn't here. And even if they did, the extension ecosystem they use is mostly meant for Chrome thus it won't use APIs Firefox has.

No extensions

[Samare]

Unless I'm mistaken, Brave on Android doesn't have extensions.

Re: Killedbymozilla

[brickhouse98]

Troll

Re:

[xack]

I've been using Firefox since the Phoenix days, I've seen multiple browsers die or switch to Chromium over my 25 years of internet usage. "Trolls" have proven right on Slashdot multiple times. If Mozilla dies its their own fault and the internet will suffer the consequences.

And the reason is.......

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"But Friday they reported that Mozilla "has announced it is ending access to Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which provides accurate, privacy-respecting, and crowdsourced geolocation data."

And the reason is because it provided "accurate, privacy-respecting, and crowdsourced geolocation data."

Re:And the reason is.......

[tlhIngan]

Or it ended up the same way Apple's location services did - you ended up with a file that could be used to track you.

Unless Mozilla give you the entire database in one go, it's going to shard it off - likely you give it an access point you can see, and it'll give you say, up to the top 1000 access points and their locations near that access point you see.

Problem is, if you're in a very WiFi dense area, that top 100 can easily be clustered around you very tightly, so it's really got a precise location on you anyways. Whereas if you were in a rural area, the top 100 around the area might encompass the entire county.

If you try to do it by location, say all access points around a mile away, that solves the problem in the dense environment, except you'll probably be downloading gigs of data and needing to store that database (might be a problem on a smartphone with 32GB of storage). Or in a rural area, that could be the only thing in a mile, now you've pinpointed yourself pretty clearly.

It's not an easy problem to solve - if you want to have a cache of such information, you'll be able to reconstruct tracks of where you've been just by looking at what areas have been cached into the database.

It's what lead to the whole Apple is tracking thing years ago (this was pre-pandemic) that forced Apple to start deprecating the file earlier and encrypting it.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

The other massive privacy problem with their service was that you couldn't opt out.

Oh, there was an opt-out mechanism where you changed your network's SSID to have "_nomap" at the end, but that was incompatible with all the other arseholes who want you to put something else in your SSID.

Dataset

[crotron]

Any plans to release the dataset either in full or in part? If they don't want to, that's their prerogative of course, but it would be unfortunate to have all that crowdsourced data vanish into the ether without the possibility of someone being able to continue their work.

Patent Shakedown?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Who went after Mozilla?

Location

[rossdee]

At least if your_device doesn't know where you are, it can't tell others...

Patents...

[bool2]

I hope after the great reset we don't reinstate this great stupidity.

Like abandoning a pet

[Arnonyrnous Covvard]

Look, if you're not ready for the responsibility, don't start a service that people are going to rely on.