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Comment by digisocialnet | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea! The users locations are completely private to the service?

Correct. The servers never see anybody's location.

But the embedded google map (especially when zoomed in or slowly panning across multiple map tiles) provides an approximate location to google regardless. Maybe that's irrelevant, but something to consider. Avoiding this might be tricky without hosting your own tiles and adding explicit obfuscation when requesting tiles.

You hit the problem right on the head. The only way to really solve it is to host my own tile server (expensive) and add some sort of 3rd party proxy service between the app and the Zood tile server (so Zood could not surveil your tile loads).

I'd like to host my own tile server in the future, but it depends on revenue, which is just not there right now.

Also, and this is just my opinion, I don't think Google is trying to surveil people via tile loading patterns. I'm not saying it's impossible, but there are far easier ways to surveil users than examining tile loading patterns. So for the time being, I'm ok using the Google Maps SDK.

Privacy, like trust, is not binary, but a spectrum. My hope is that Zood Location can start increasing the amount of privacy people enjoy in their digital lives, and over time, the app can be improved to increase that level of privacy.

Very tangentially related, a distributed tile service could be interesting. I'd love to just download a virtual appliance, point it at some disk space, and tell it how much bandwidth to use. Maaaaybe tell it what region to focus on, if I want to use my own local tile server for my own local projects because it won't ratelimit me because I'm me.

But if I could just do that, and with no further admin overhead, contribute to some sort of tile-cloud, I'd find that a lot more meaningful than seeding my favorite distro's torrents, you know?

I don't know if openstreetmaps provides a free tile server, but I could see that as an option for the more privacy minded. Or to preload a basic map so your not querying a tile server, and to go even further, preload a more detailed map like older offline GPS apps.

In the iOS app you can also add an option to use apple maps instead too.

You're not supposed to use OSM's free servers in production, and the options for running your own are assembly-required to such a degree that I can't even assess how far beyond my own skills they lie.

You could also load tiles over Tor, but I guess Google would block those.

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