Google knows where you are by default

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Even if you don’t use any Goolge services directly, Google will know a lot about you. For example when using the libre web browser Firefox from Mozilla. Let me quote from their site: “We’ve always designed Firefox to protect and respect your private information.”.

When using a location service, one get the message “Would you like to share your location with <website>?” when it should really say “Would you like to share your location with Google and <website>?”. This is stated if you “Learn more…”.

This may not supprise you, as Mozilla get 90 percent of its revenue from Google, and therefore use lots of Google services out of the box.

Mozilla started their own location service over a year ago with the goal to “Improve the privacy aspects of the geolocation service compared to the current market offerings.”, which is a good thing. It can be used by following this guide. My results has been varying.

Unfortunately Mozilla isn’t as open as they could be on this. They will not share their database. I recommend using OpenWLANMap instead, as they both are older than Mozilla Location Service and do share the database.

By installing this add-on you can transparently use OpenWLANMap in Firefox instead.

You can join in collecting data for both services by using Mozilla Stubmler app or OpenWLANMap app.

I’m not aware of any positioning for web browsers that works off-line, like one can on android using Nogapps.

Firefox on falkp.no/blog

Google knows where you are by default