Re: Draft 10 February 2010: privacy issues

Frank,

IE9 is using nearby WiFi signatures to determine your location. It hits out to a web service at inference.location.live.com for the triangulation lookup.

Firefox and Chrome do the same but using a Google dataset.

These implementations are all vendor specific. They don't use any underlying infrastructure from O2 or your Huawei device. (A different technology, Geopriv, would.)

The geolocation API document you're reading just defines the API for exposing the information to a web page, not how that information is sourced.

--
Tatham Oddie
Tiny keyboard = tiny message

On Feb 17, 2011, at 16:30, "Frank Ellermann" <hmdmhdfmhdjmzdtjmzdtzktdkztdjz@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 21:41:13 UTC