Article Summary:
Mozilla Location Service has been discontinued in the middle of 2024, since geoclue relies on it for location, most Linux users now have features relying on location broken.
It seems Arch Linux migrated to using Google, but that wouldn’t be accepted for Fedora due to its stance on privacy.
We should teach users how to migrate to a separate service for location as well as how to contribute to the service they are going to use.
Article Description:
The article should at least contain this data:
Explain a bit what is Ichnaea and the Mozilla Location Services
List some recommended services for the user to use as a replacement (beacondb seems like the most interesting one at this point)
Teach the user to use an app to gather the location data (wifi networks, cell data and BT beacon) and submit it
Help the user to choose between Tower Collector (cell data only) and NeoStumbler, and between NeoStumbler fdroid and full variants (the full variant has a few proprietary components that somewhat improve the experience)
Suggest the user to also upload data to OpenCellid, as even if that doesn’t directly affect location data, the data is later released under a Cretive Commons license
At the end we should teach how to change the used geoclue backedn by editing geoclue.conf
Most other stuff would be either more context, explanations and also the possibility of info about other replacement services.
If we are going to break it into multiple article it makes sense for me to do like this:
First article explain what is Mozilla Location Services and explains the shutdown. It also teaches the user how to migrate to Google Play location services (if they are fine with the privacy concerns) or a open source alternative
Second article would be how to contribute by submitting wifi, cell data or BT beacons using an Android phone.
I don’t have an account on the forum to comment, but you will probably also be interested to know (if you don’t already know) that Geoclue usage (for example with GNOME Maps=OpenStreetMap) with Google Geolocation API is forbidden by Google ToS even if privacy wasn’t a concern (Coğrafi Konum API'si politikaları | Geolocation API | Google for Developers):
Maybe it’s best to just skip recommending Google services for this?
Not sure how Arch Linux handles it or if they even care.
Also I’m having issues on getting geoclue to work correctly on my system where I have replaced the traditional NetworkManager+wpa_supplicant setup with NetworkManager+iwd.
On this setup it will not send wifi data and will fallback to a GeoIP implementation by beacondb.
Might be worth to add a note for that while I will be investigating here.
