beaconDB info and how to contribute

Staudey

As some of you might know the Mozilla Location Service (MLS), that was used by many Open Source projects as a provider of geolocation data, was retired last year. This left many, among them Solus, without access to this type of geolocation information. Some switched to Google services, which, apart from privacy concerns, have their own issues with limited API access and so on.

Luckily a new public domain wireless geolocation database became operational in recent months, beaconDB. They are, or strife to be, ethically sourced, privacy friendly and abuse resistant. For details see the link at the start of this paragraph.

I've also recently enabled the beaconDB API in Solus' geoclue package.

It is meant to be a full replacement of MLS, but unfortunately still hasn't great data coverage. But this is where you can help to improve the geolocation accuracy for everyone!
The "contribute" section on the beaconDB page has all the info: https://beacondb.net/#contribute

Personally I've installed the NeoStumbler app on my Android phone (via F-Droid) and activate it whenever I walk in a new area, or ride the bus/train somewhere. According to the statistics in the app I apparently have already scanned 32000(!) different Wi-Fis, 860 cell towers, and 690 "Bluetooth beacons". Unfortunately there is no gamification like achievements (yet? 😀), but it's quite fun to see the numbers go up, and observe the difference between trips in rural locations and cities.

Around 5 minutes after you submit reports you can already see the updated coverage map on https://beacondb.net/map/
It feels good to fill out some previously empty spots. The accuracy of this global map is quite low though, but you can see pretty fine-grained mapping details in the NeoStumbler app (and perhaps also in the Tower Collector one, but I haven't tried it)

Staudey

Just to be clear, the above image is not showing the full accuracy even of the global map on beaconsDB. When you zoom in the finest mapping resolution looks more like this

Staudey

Seems like Fedora Magazine also talked about beaconDB a bit more than a week ago

https://fedoramagazine.org/the-state-of-the-location-permission-on-fedora-linux-in-2025/

(thanks to @JoshStrobl for posting the story on Mastodon)

Staudey

As a small update to this, while I've been less active in collecting new data for beaconDB (mostly due to staying in more or less the same region(s)) I recently reached the milestone of 100000 discovered Wi-Fi's (and a bit more than 2000 of each cells and Bluetooth beacons)

So far it's been great fun seeing the numbers go up when I'm driving/hiking/walking/etc. in a new region, and you can definitely notice the difference in density between city and rural areas.

With the new version of the NeoStumbler app you can also now choose a beaconsDB map overlay, to see which regions around you have already been covered by someone else, and which are still completely blank.

(here the pink-ish tiles are my reports, while orange marks global beaconDB data)

As you can see on this small map and on the beaconDB map screen there is still a lot of data left to collect, especially in regions like Africa, South America, parts of Asia. Every new data collector helps a lot (see original posts and/or beaconDB website for instructions on how to contribute)