Comment on Mozilla Drops Axe on its Privacy-Friendly Location Service
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 3 months ago
This should be pretty much impossible to replace short-term without resorting to Google. Building a database that maps routers, cell towers and more to coordinates from scratch takes a lot of time I imagine.
I would say that it’s not hard to replace. I mean, all you need is an app that dumps GPS data and a list of signal strengths to start building out a database.
What’s hard is doing one that is as complete and accurate as Google’s, because Google is hoovering up data from most cell phones about the location of a lot of devices.
You are glossing over a lot of infrastructure and development, when boiled down to the basics you are right. So it is basically a question of getting enough users to have that app installed. Which is not impossible given that we do have initiatives like OpenStreetMap.
The crowdsourcing part is what I meant. And you probably underestimate infrastructure as well.
This also isn’t something you can just let a few volunteers do once and forget about it. It needs to be something that people run often on their phones. Wi-Fi access points change, cell towers sometimes change. You need to keep this data up-to-date. With Google’s or Apple’s location service, when a person buys a new router, it’s probably added to the database within hours or days at worst.
I just happened to come across an fdroid app that does this
mp3@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Not sure if that is the kind of stuff that could be merged with OpenStreetMap’s dataset.
bufalo1973@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Why not? Harder translations are made between file formats.
mp3@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
I’m sure it can be done technically, not sure if that would fall within the OSM mission though.