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Comment on Mozilla Drops Axe on its Privacy-Friendly Location Service

tal@lemmy.today ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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.

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Creesch@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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