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Mozilla Axes its Privacy-Friendly Location Service (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Mozilla has announced it is ending access to Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which provides accurate, privacy-respecting, and crowdsourced geolocation

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[–] jagungal 26 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] jagungal 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Huh, guess I was wrong. Would be nice if they laid that out a bit more explicitly in the article

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

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