ichnaea VS Nominatim

The rather troubling part of this announcement in a GitHub issue is that this nugget comes out in a seemingly innocuous comment[1]:

>> Firefox still uses MLS for `browser.region.network.url`; will that also move to Google Location Services?

> This endpoint will be migrated to another service (classify-client) that will return the expected response. We'll adjust DNS entries when it's time to make that move so firefox won't see any difference.

What exactly is this "classify-client" service?

Note also this led me to discover for the first time that this is a thing[2]:

> Geolocation for default search engine

> In order to set the right default search engine for your location, Firefox will perform a geolocation lookup once by contacting Mozilla's servers and store the country-level result locally. This connection happens on the first start of Firefox – in case you want to prohibit that, you will have to preconfigure the browser and set the browser.search.geoip.url preference to a blank string.

Also related is [3].

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065#issuecomment-...

[2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...

[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/iq27wa/disabling_l...

I don't know what WiGLE users do with the data, but the WiGLE admins sold Wi-Fi location data to Microsoft to bootstrap Bing Maps back in the day.

I helped bootstrap Mozilla's Location Service (MLS) to support geolocation on Firefox OS without Google Location Services. Mozilla even had its own Wi-Fi "wardriving/stumbling" app (MozStumbler https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler) and an opt-in stumbler in Firefox Android. But once Firefox OS was retired, there wasn't much need for MLS. However, Mozilla still runs a Wi-Fi geolocation service open to other projects (like GNOME's Geoclue service).

Mozilla also publishes cell tower location data and shares with the OpenCellID stumbling project. I worked with Mozilla's privacy and security teams to see if we could publish the Wi-Fi location data, but we didn't find a privacy-preserving way to do that.

For more information about MLS, check out https://location.services.mozilla.com/

Google mainly makes a search engine deal and pays Mozilla to use Google Location services rather than Mozilla's. Google doesn't control the development of Firefox, or its browser engine Gecko (at least directly, they do maniplulate the market so other browsers are forced to implement their stuff, Manifest v3 itself being an example).

The same is possible with bluetooth. Source: Mozilla Location Services

Tower Collector, as an app, collects for both https://opencellid.org/ and https://location.services.mozilla.com/ . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla\_Location\_Service

I had used Google's Geolocation API and Mozilla Location Service in the past.

You can simply use geopy API to get longitude and latitude from address. geopy includes geocoder classes for the OpenStreetMap Nominatim, Google Geocoding API (V3), and many other geocoding services. The full list is available on the Geocoders doc section. Geocoder classes are located in geopy.geocoders. Here…

I have had a lot of "fun" with this feature in the past. It has earned a permanent place in my setup script:

ALTER SYSTEM SET jit=off;

Basically a performance blackhole for more complex queries. Most OSM related projects disable it straight away as it only creates headaches.

https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/pull/2559

Because osm.org and OsmAnd use different search engines. On osm.org it uses the Nominatim geocoder which is good at parsing addresses the way we are used to writing them. It is also running on a server with a lot of storage and memory resources. OsmAnd is built for offline use so it can't use Nominatim and has much more limited computing resources available to it. It is searching through the map files locally on your phone and however they have chosen to implement that search algorithm seems to perform poorly on addresses.

Ako skupa s adresama imaš i njihove lokacije možeš i koristiti gotov geocoder (e.g. Nominatim je free i koristi OSM podatke, možeš i deployati svoju instancu), pa iz rezultata naći geometrijski najbližu adresu koju imaš.

Then implement a use case. We are going to use Geocoding use case with Nominatim provider. But you can, of course, use a different provider. Copy the example code into your server.js file and make a few changes, so we can send the information we will receive from the user:

There are reasons why this tech was developed: because GPS can take a long time to sync up to the satellites, because GPS often doesn't work indoors, because your phone can keep a local cache of locations, and so you have the ability to find places by name or address (Geocoding) using nominatim ( https://nominatim.org )

and nominatim which does the geocoding/reverse geocoding: https://nominatim.org/

Then it depends on how the location data is conveyed in the group chat. If it's a text message you need to parse it and possibly use a mapping service to do geocoding. Eg. convert "22 Main Street" or "upper Brooklyn" into GPS coordinates. Besides Google Maps API you can maybe use OpenStreetMaps via Nominatim. If it's something more like "we just passed John's house" then you need to figure out how to write some logic to determine a location from that. Or maybe they just used the WhatsApp location share feature, then you probably don't need mapping at all.