Re: FW: CountryHawk: New component for detecting visitor country of origin

At 09:50 AM 6/12/02 -0400, Suzanne M. Topping wrote:
>Does anyone have comments about this product?

reading the claims about what it does, the product literatures suggests 
somewhat scary extrapolations from the data the tool can generate:


>  - displaying site content in the visitor's native language and currency

Users in Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and a host of other countries would 
hope that the language setting in their browser be given higher priority.

>  - preventing sharing of passwords and abuse of service (i.e. users
>    should not be logging in from multiple countries during the same day)

Wonder what comes next - a suggestion to not let people dial up from two 
different states in the US at the same time? Following this suggestion to 
the letter looks like it would land the site developer with lots of unhappy 
customers in no time.

Also, the advertised accuracy rate of 98% could mean that 2% of all 
customers are denied service (if the site developer implements all the 
stringent restrictions suggested in the advertisement). That's a false 
denial rate that's surely much higher than typical rates of fraudulent 
interactions...

A./

Received on Thursday, 13 June 2002 16:48:17 UTC