These are all reasonable questions and things we wrestle with. Here's some of my perspective. Others in the team are welcome to chime in with additional thoughts.
On Mar 13, 2015, at 3:57 PM, Gervase Markham <[email protected]> wrote: > On 06/03/15 12:56, Hanno Schlichting wrote: >> We've finally been able to announce our new partnership with Combain AS, >> head over to our blog post: >> >> https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2015/03/06/combain-deal-helps-expand-mozilla-location-service/ > > A commenter on that blog post asked the following question: > > "I think the community deserves to know more details about this data > exchange. Is Mozilla's proprietary Wi-Fi database now the IP of Combain? Our current database will not be going over to Combain. They will be receiving new readings that we acquire. I don't think IP is the correct term to use here - it implies it is now somehow exclusively theirs and they can keep others from it. They merely have a copy of data we send to them. > Are stumbler contributions now being used for that company's profit? Indirectly, yes. Ultimately, that's the goal of this project - to make the map itself just a fundamental piece of data, not "owned". We believe that this will help encourage an array of companies to sprout up to provide superior offerings and greater choice in the geolocation space from what is available today. Of course, to get there, we have a long way to go, both in terms of filling in the map and working out the various privacy issues. Combain helps with both of these goals, as well as helping us with improved lookups. > Since the Wi-Fi database was deemed too private to release to the > public, unlike like the cell ID database, what precautions are being > taken when sharing it with Combain? Combain is, in many ways, the ideal initial partner. They are interested in the data to improve their overall positioning map, and are using it in ways that are relatively innocuous. The problem with the raw data is that it does have sharing concerns that are still to be worked out, and Combain is already used to these from maintaining their own raw-data database. They'll handle our data as carefully as they handle their own. > For those who trust Mozilla, what grounds are there for extending that trust > to Combain? You shouldn't, inherently. We have pretty good radar for how companies that want to use the data plan to do so, and Combain "feels" pretty good to us, but there's nothing contractual enforcing that. Their interests (which can be seen on their website) are definitely in providing accurate positioning, rather than using the data in less appealing ways, but ultimately location services are sold - via api - to third parties, and it's not reasonable for us to be dictating what those third parties can or cannot do. In the event that Combain fails to live up to our expectations (general, not contractual), we have the option to terminate the contract any time. > What data from > Combain, if any, will ever find its way into the public domain?” So I have to be a little handwavy here, because we're talking about a special plan for Combain data. Let's talk about the generic case first. Our general contract places no requirements on the data. It'll go into the main corpus and, as we figure out how to share that, can be shared. Other contracts may have restrictions on what we can do with the data; those contracts are obviously less important to us, but if they can help improve MLS, we'll still consider them. The Combain contract is a general one. However, we've been wrestling with how to measure the quality of MLS, and one of the things we're thinking of doing is moving the Combain data into its own dataset and using it for testing. Our own stumbler data isn't good for that - it's biased towards data that we already have - so this data represents a unique opportunity. So the answer to this direct question is "no, not for now", but not for the reasons that people might think. Ultimately, it should one day be included. Hopefully these are useful answers. Eventually, we'd like to share as much as we possibly can, and we're happy to talk to others who want to use the data to see if we can find a reasonable way to make it happen, but there's a lot to be solved before we get all the way there. Toby _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
