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.

Nogapps - A replacement for gapps

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I recently discovered nogapps, and it’s working great! Here’s an intro and how to use it.

# Background

When installing Android on a phone, one first flashes the ROM, i.e. Cyanogenmod. Then a package called gapps, which contains Googles proprietary Apps. This is necessary to get Play, Youtube, GMail, Maps, etc. And lots of apps from Play requires Play and it’s services to function.

Someone has started the project Nogapps which aims to replace some of the gapps services with open services.

As an example, you can only use GPS for location if you don’t have gapps. The other methods, wifi and cell tower id, comes from Google. Nogapps replaces this with “Network Location”. An app and a database which gives off-line location lookup.

# Installing Network Location

Before you even consider this: you need root, you need to tinker with your device. A full backup is always adviced.

Start with a phone with root access and i.e. Cyanogenmod installed. Probably works with other ROMs as well.
Download the Android SDK from Google to your PC.
This should give you access to adb, the tool to communicate with android via USB. For me the path became $ ~/Downloads/adt-bundle-linux-x86_64-20140702/sdk/platform-tools/adb
You need developer mode enabled on your phone, and to approve the computer. Not covered by this guide.
Make sure you’re connected:

$ adb devices

List of devices attached
014nnnnnnnnn800F    device

Get root access to phone, this must first be allowed in phone settings: $ adb root
Make system partition writable:

$ adb remount

remount succeeded

Download Network Location apk from the Nogapps project website and push to phone: $ adb push NetworkLocation.apk /system/app/NetworkLocation.apk
Download the cells.db for your continent from the Nogapps project website and and push to phone: $ adb push cells-europe.db /sdcard/.nogapps/cells.db
Reboot phone.

# Usage

If you’re using Privacy Guard you will be prompted the first time your phone tries to look up the location. Now make sure you’ve activated non-GPS location:

And enjoy. It works in every app:

# Contributing

If you want to contribute to the cells database, use apps like MozStumbler and OpenWLANMap.

# Further on

Nogapps consists of more that this feature, but it’s the one most important to me, and the only one I’ve tested so far.

Edit: updated 2014-10-21