ichnaea VS location-guard

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.

I'm on the fence. While I think some of these features should be absolutely not part of a browser's scope, I think there will always be legitimate use cases.

What I'm absolutely convinced of is for better controls. A little more than a year ago, our government required the banking industry to know their users' locations for some reason. So now the banks ask for my location, otherwise I can't login.

While on a mobile device it would be quite hard to give them a fake location without rooting/jailbreaking, in my browser I could find a reputable, open source extension [1] that helps me protect my privacy.

These kind of controls should be part of each of these features, without risking installing an extension with nefarious intent.

1: https://github.com/chatziko/location-guard

In order to bypass LP's new security you will need Location Guard. It is available as an extension for a few supported browsers. Once you have that installed, go ahead and set your FIXED LOCATION to anywhere that's not in the Blazers blackout area. It really doesn't matter, but I just went ahead and set it to Mumbai, India.

Something like the Location Guard add on might be of interest to you