[nanis]

The rather troubling part of this announcement in a GitHub issue is that this nugget comes out in a seemingly innocuous comment[1]:

>> Firefox still uses MLS for `browser.region.network.url`; will that also move to Google Location Services?

> This endpoint will be migrated to another service (classify-client) that will return the expected response. We'll adjust DNS entries when it's time to make that move so firefox won't see any difference.

What exactly is this "classify-client" service?

Note also this led me to discover for the first time that this is a thing[2]:

> Geolocation for default search engine

> In order to set the right default search engine for your location, Firefox will perform a geolocation lookup once by contacting Mozilla's servers and store the country-level result locally. This connection happens on the first start of Firefox – in case you want to prohibit that, you will have to preconfigure the browser and set the browser.search.geoip.url preference to a blank string.

Also related is [3].

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065#issuecomment-...

[2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...

[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/iq27wa/disabling_l...

[codethief]

classify-client is probably this project: https://github.com/mozilla/classify-client

Looks like it depends on a GeoIP database.

[joveian]

Searching for the file name the default database seems to be MaxMind's free database:

https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geolite2-free-geolocation-data

They are the comany that infamously set the default US location to a farm in Kansas, causing all sorts of trouble for the people who live there. From the file name it sounds like classify-client is by default only trying to identify the country you are in.

I'm not seeing a browser.search.geoip.url setting, however I have geo.enabled set to false and various other setting that might cause that to not be present.

[kps]

>> Firefox still uses MLS for `browser.region.network.url`; will that also move to Google Location Services?

Is that the latest rename of `geo.provider.network.url`? And if so, have they changed the json format again too? I set that manually on my desktop because Mozilla's regularly put me far away (and in a different legal jurisdiction).