Draft 10 February 2010: privacy issues

Hi, in the IEBlog Microsoft claims to have implemented your draft:
<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/17/w3c-geolocation-api-in-ie9.aspx>

They offer a nice test page for this service at
<http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/HTML5/Geolocation/Default.html>

Apparently IE9 follows your recommendations about privacy and asked
for my consent to locate me. Apparently Chrome 9 does not yet offer
to allow this only once for a given site.

But what surprises me is that this works at all precisely. I'm used
to vague and unreliable results with IP based geolocation, but with
mobile broadband geolocation the location is exact.

While I trust that MS and Google get the privacy issues right sooner
or later your draft has no "security considerations" for less well-
behaved services. Can everybody claim to have my consent?

Your draft also does not yet tell me how the various geolocation
services work. For IP based geolocation (limited to IPv4) I have a
very good idea how this is done and the limitations.

For mobile broadband I'm rather annoyed that an unclear collaboration
of my operating system (windows 7), my wireless broadband provider
(o2), and the USB device (Huawei) shares my location with anybody -
special cases such as E911 and legal enforcement not withstanding.

Your draft should tell me more about the various sources, and how
to disable geolocation at the source (where applicable, clearly I
cannot get rid of IP based geolocation).

Regards

Received on Thursday, 17 February 2011 21:28:57 UTC