Re: Proximity alarm interface

* Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>I think the primary use case is privacy. For store offers (groupon),  
>meetings (conferences, etc.), and a bunch of other cases I'd be happy to  
>tell the site I'm around, but not tell them where I am all the time.

If you want location aware services but do not want such services to
learn too much about your whereabouts, then you can have that, more so
than what the proposed API provides. With, as always, various caveats.

To illustrate, you could, for instance, make this declarative: the site
tells what is available at which location, and when you get near one of
the points, the browser shows the pre-loaded information without letting
the site know, up to where you leave what's pre-loaded if you so choose.
You could then even preview and browse the information without moving.

There are issues of course, for instance, a site may wish to make it
hard for you to learn what is available at some locations unless you
actually are there at a certain point in time. Whether that matters we
do not know as this discussion started out with a proposal and people
then explained what may be good about it.

For battery utilization, web sites could tell the browser, through an
extension of the existing interfaces, to filter for certain locations,
without having the user make a different kind of decision as to what
information they want to disclose. Given that, I am rather unconvinced
"better for battery! better for privacy!" should be mixed like this.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Thursday, 30 June 2011 18:35:14 UTC