Tower Collector is an app to help contribute mobile tower data to Mozilla Location Services and OpenCellID, so that its open to all instead of a few large companies. Both of them are open source projects.
This data can be used for estimating location without GPS for example.
Fdroid link
that's a cool application, but how does it stack up privacy wise?
it says it doesn't collect any personally identifiable data, but aren't the location data and ip data enough to locate people?
It is technically possible for Mozilla or OpenCellId to abuse this data but they're one of the only companies I kinda trust while being a privacy nerd. Also I assume they only store IP's privately and not in the public database.
If you use an online service to upload which towers you see, and get an approximate location as a response, then yes, it could be just ad bad from a privacy perspective. What these open databases allow is the possibility to download the whole tower database to your device, and then do the lookups locally.
oh yeah, i guess using Google location services is the same as sharing this with Mozilla or something, and Mozilla isn't Google
Yeah, this is kind of what left me on the fence on whether to contribute or not to OSM. You have to create an account to contribute, and AFAIK contribution authorship is public in OSM. And if I were to contribute, I'd probably do a lot of contributuions related to my living place's surroundings, which means that, if my OSM account were ever to be associated with any of my other facets on the Internet, I would get doxxed in the easiest way possible.