I have never used this system in my life, kinda hate it to be honest! But it’s becoming ubiquitous where I am and I wondered if there is any ‘more private’ way of making use of it, such as a program for Fedora which can look up W3W locations easily?
I am also looking for an app for grapheneos/android (as private as possible) where I could open it to give someone my W3W location.
If anyone has any tips or tricks, I’m all ears, thanks!
Interesting idea - replace a series of numbers with a same amount of letters from a proprietary database.
It seems it can work ‘offline’ with the app Does the app work without phone signal or data connection?
As for a Fedora version, I don’t think so.
I’ll see if I can find the licensing information - if it is closed source then it will not be possible.
I don’t know for sure, but according to Wikipedia:
What3words differs from most location encoding systems] in that it uses words rather than strings of numbers or letters, and the pattern of this mapping is not obvious; the algorithm mapping locations to words is copyrighted…
What3words has been subject to a number of criticisms both for its closed source code…
[…]
The company has pursued a policy of issuing copyright claims against individuals and organisations that have hosted or published files of the What3words algorithm or reverse-engineered code that replicates the service’s functionality, such as the free and open source implementation WhatFreeWords; the whatfreewords[.]org website was taken down following a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice issued by What3words. This policy has extended to removing comments on social media which refer to unauthorised versions. In late April 2021, a security researcher who had offered on Twitter to share WhatFreeWords software was contacted by What3Words’s law firm, requiring him to delete the tweets and the software, and implying that legal action might follow non-compliance.
which seems a bit discouraging for the possibility of FOSS tools that work with it.
Thanks both of you. How disgusting! I am now not using it, and intend to convert others away from it.
I can certainly see the appeal. I was stuck in a location a few days ago, used Google in browser (private tab) to get co-ordinates to give someone. Its very hard to do anything useful with this!!…
32°54’52.08"N 6°56’17.48"W
Saying : Cheese, Poland, Sausage
seems way easier!
I guess i need to look for other ways to do something similar, or all have one app where coordinates are generated and understand on all devices. I really struggle with these Lats and Longs!
Check out the Wikipedia ‘see also’ section,
The Maidenhead system comes somewhere in the middle for usability Maidenhead Locator System - Wikipedia