this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Everything about privacy (the confidentiality pillar of security) -- but not restricted to infosec. Offline privacy is also relevant here.
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It currently only has a very basic approach to altitude estimation which we'll be properly integrating into the trilateration algorithm in the near future.
It currently only uses Wi-Fi networks but we'll be extending it with support for using cell towers as a fallback in the near future.
We're in the process of building our own network location database based on scraping all of the cell tower and Wi-Fi data from Apple's service. Scraping all the cell tower data is quick and will be easy to keep rapidly updated. A contributor scraped more than 2 billion Wi-Fi APs over 3 months.
This data isn't copyrightable and Apple freely offers it without requiring authentication. It will be the initial basis for our database, but we'll add other sources including an option to send us data from GrapheneOS devices. We'll provide database downloads to support offline network location.
@[email protected] Good thing that US does not recognize database "rights". EU and UK do, for example.
@[email protected] Apple gathered the data from scraping data from Wi-Fi APs and cell towers and they scrape a lot of the web to train search, AIs, etc. so they'd have a lot of trouble arguing we're doing anything wrong using open access public data provided by them with no authentication. It's unlikely they'll care. We do plan to move towards having people submit data in the future but it's not a short term viable approach especially with a privacy focused userbase who aren't going to want to send data.