F-Secure Open Sources Location Service Source Code

F-Secure has contributed the source code of its ramped-down location service, F-Secure Lokki, to the open source community. The donation makes it possible for anyone and everyone to freely use the software in their possible new location services and apps. It also creates an opportunity for forming an open source community around location sharing with security and privacy in mind.

“Like most tech companies today, F-Secure benefits from the use of open source in our products,” says HarriKiljander, Director, Consumer Security at F-Secure. “It doesn’t make sense to reinvent something that is built by talented and passionate people and proven to work. Therefore we also like to give back to the community, so others can use our building blocks to innovate. With open source, everyone benefits from sharing the development effort.”

F-Secure launched the Lokki location sharing app for families and other privacy-minded groups in 2013. In late 2014, in order to better focus on other services strategically closer to its security and privacy agenda, F-Secure decided to ramp down Lokki as an independent service. Through the open source initiative the Lokki technology will continue to live on and possibly power new location service innovations by students, startups and mobile service developers, and offer a research platform for academic partners.

The Lokki open source project is already being used in an Open Academy project with computer science students from the Software Factory of the University of Helsinki, the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.