Maps sometimes defaults to old address

/e/OS Smartphone Operating System Features & Applications
1

I have a weird thing happening in Maps in that sometimes the location starts at my old house. The strange thing is that I haven’t lived there for over a year now and I never lived there with my current phone. I currently have a FP5 which I only got in the last 2 months.
The old house address is in a town that is 20 miles away from where I live now.

How does the phone/maps even know about my old address?

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/ the unGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

2

I have been struggling with this problem as well. My best guess is that it is related to microG using Mozilla’s location services. If you go into the system preferences>microG, you could try turning off “request from Mozilla” and see if that works. That, however, is a non ideal situation because you probably want to use Mozilla’s location service.

My problem is that I don’t fully understand what Mozilla location services do because

  • I bought a new phone, and
  • I bought a new router

yet, my old home address shows up sporadically when I am in my home.

I originally thought that these types of location services only used known wifi hotspot mac addresses. However, since I replaced my old router and phone, and since none of my other devices are being used as a hotspot, this isn’t true. The only thing that makes sense is that the mac addresses of devices on my local network somehow got into Mozilla’s database, and that microG sends all mac addresses to Mozilla, even if they are not wifi access points. Another possibility is that this is related to bluetooth beacons on my network.

The annoying thing is that it doesn’t appear to be possible to remove devices from Mozilla’s database (https://location.services.mozilla.com/). Of course you can add a “_nomap” to the access point name, but you can not request that Mozilla remove your devices that are already in the database.

1 Like
3

Very interesting, thanks for the info

4

you could request an API key with MLS and send them your known MACs and see what’s returned if this explains the behaviour

5

This topic was automatically closed after 90 days. New replies are no longer allowed.