CloudServices/Location

Objective

The objective of this project is to produce a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of a Location Service for B2G.

Summary

The "Open Location" 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 a public data sets. In order to do this assessment, we need to understand the technological challenges and get real data. Therefore, the Services team will build and operate a location service to provide geolocation lookup for devices, based on cell tower, Wi-Fi or IP address information.

Geolocation lookup is a very useful service to provide to users. There's no public data set to provide this service. None of the current companies offering this type of service has 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 make it available to the public. If we can run a successful service, we get leverage to improve the privacy aspects in the landscape.

For more information about user privacy, see [1].

Goals

• Drive deep integration of a tier one location platform: Platform 2013 Goals
• v1 Location Service for B2G: Services 2013Q2 Goals
• 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.
• Make as much of the data as possible available under permissive open licenses.

Iterations

2013Q2

• current search/measure API: https://mozilla-ichnaea.readthedocs.org/
• no real SLA
• takes in and stores all measurements
• update of cell tower locations based on our own measurements

Roadmap

• define a version 1 protocol for gathering cell/wifi data
• implement and deploy a prototype of a data gathering server
• look at and assess data quality sent from any of the clients

2013Q3

• provide SLA / scale (dependent on services-ops availability)
• search by wifi access points (if enough data is available)

Future

Future tasks that are not prioritized or are potentially out-of-scope:

• Improve accuracy based on signal strength
• trilateration
• how do we deal with spam ?
• API calls rate quota ? (limits on service usage, "price tiers"?)
• authentication for sending data ?
• design and specify open data protocol for raw access to data?
• deal with altitude
• Non-goal: Compete on the full scale of location related services, like maps, geocoding, driving directions.

Get Involved

Project Meeting

• Time: Thursday 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.

IRC

Join the #geo channel on Mozilla's IRC server (irc.mozilla.org).

Mailing List

You can subscribe to the mailing list at https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation

Report Bugs

Bugs should be reported in the Mozilla Services :: Location component of Bugzilla.

• List of open bugs: Location bugs

Source Code and Development

• Source code: https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea
• Developer documentation: https://mozilla-ichnaea.readthedocs.org/