CloudServices/Location

Objective

The objective of this project is to produce a minimum viable version of a Location Service for clients (devices or browsers) to determine their location based on ambient wireless network information.

Contributing

The easiest way to help the Location project is by running the MozStumbler Android app to collection wireless network locations around your city. You can compete against other stumbler users on our Leaderboard and watch the project's progress on our Database Stats and Coverage Map pages.

• Download MozStumbler installer: https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler/releases

Another way to contribute is to help implement new features and fix bugs in our MozStumbler Android app. The Java code and build instructions are on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler

Summary

The "Mozilla Location Service" project is a pilot project to assess the impact Mozilla can have on the geolocation landscape, specifically to improve user privacy and enable innovation by creating public data sets. In order to do this assessment, we need to understand the technological and legal challenges. Therefore, the Cloud Services team will build and operate a location service to provide geolocation lookup for devices, based on for example cell tower and Wi-Fi data.

Geolocation lookup is a very useful service to provide to users. None of the current companies offering this type of service have any incentive to improve on privacy. Geolocation lookup and the potential for tracking the physical movement of individuals is a serious privacy issue.

Why Mozilla? The web platform needs the capability, and currently we have to provide it in our offerings through business deals without much impact on the privacy aspects of the service. We have a unique access to Firefox on lots of devices for gathering and reporting back data. We don't have to monetize the gathered data and can operate a public service. If we can run a successful service, we get leverage to improve the privacy aspects in the landscape.

FAQ

Every project has some frequently asked questions.

Goals

• Location Service Roadmap
• Provide a highly accurate geolocation service for any device and in any country, based on publicly sent signal information (like cell towers, Wi-Fi, IP addresses).
• Improve the privacy aspects of the geolocation service compared to the current market offerings.

Links

• MozStumbler client source code: https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler
• MozStumbler client releases: https://github.com/mozilla/MozStumbler/releases
• Server API documentation: https://mozilla-ichnaea.readthedocs.org/ (the actual endpoint is https://location.services.mozilla.com/v1/...)
• Server source code: https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea
• Stumbler leaderboard stats and map: https://location.services.mozilla.com/stats
• Relevant projects and literature

Bug reporting

• Bugs can be reported in the general Bugzilla tracker under the Mozilla Services :: Location component (for legal, operations, or unknown category)
• A list of open bugs: Location bugs
• If the bug is about the stumbler of server code or has a patch / pull request associated with it, you can use the github bug trackers for the two projects.

Meetings

The team holds a weekly meeting to discuss location client and server development:

• Time: Wednesday at 10:00AM PDT / 13:00PM EDT / 6:00PM UTC.
• Place: Vidyo room #geolocation (9429)
• Phone (US/Intl): 1 650 903 0800 x92 Conf: 9429#
• Phone (Toronto): 1 416 848 3114 x92 Conf: 9429#

If you cannot join via Vidyo, you can call in via one of the phone numbers. Please mute yourself with '* 1' upon joining to prevent needless noise and feedback. You can unmute yourself with '* 1' again to speak.

Communication

• Join the #geo channel on Mozilla's IRC server (irc.mozilla.org).
• You can subscribe to the mailing list at https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation

Meeting Notes

Create a new weekly agenda from the template: <createbox> align=left type=create preload=CloudServices/Location/Template default=2026-02-11 prefix=CloudServices/Location/Meetings/ </createbox>