Mozilla has announced it is ending access to Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which provides accurate, privacy-respecting, and crowdsourced geolocation
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This is just a taste of what’s to come from a Mozilla led by Laura Chambers, the new CEO. We should not let her get away with making these decisions as the faceless Mozilla, and we should make sure that the communities impacted by her decisions are made aware of who is responsible for them.
They had no method of getting new data for two years already, because Google disallowed location collection like that on Android. It was just a matter of time before the service would be turned off.
Please don’t spread FUD like that. This is unrelated to the CEO since this project has been in an barely alive state for a long time due to patent trolls.
Huh, guess I was wrong. Would be nice if they laid that out a bit more explicitly in the article
The accuracy of Mozilla Location Service (MLS) has steadily declined. With no plans to restart the stumbler program or increase investments to MLS we have made the decision to retire the service.
In 2013, Mozilla launched MLS as an open service to provide geolocation lookups based on publicly observable radio signals. The service received community submissions of GPS data from the open source MozStumbler Android app. In 2019, Skyhook Holdings, Inc contacted Mozilla and alleged that MLS infringed a number of its patents. We reached an agreement with Skyhook that avoided litigation. This required us to make changes to our MLS policies and made it difficult for us to invest in and expand MLS. In early 2021, we retired the MozStumbler program.
This is from their announcement regarding the sunsetting.
Yet another privacy respecting service shuttered.
I fear for the future. We already have a generation that was raised under surveillance and who lash out at anyone who seeks this type of privacy, and it’s only going to get worse. Surveillance is becoming more and more normalized.
My greatest fear is that Firefox itself could one day shut down.
Seriously think I’d be better off as a hermit somewhere in remote rural Mexico. Anyone wanna join me? Just send me your name, address, a non-VOIP phone number, a full set of fingerprints, and retinal scans, and you’re in. /s
That sucks
We’ll see what happens to Rust here in the near future.
