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Firefox Add-On To Track Your Location Via Wi-Fi
Barence writes "Mozilla Labs has unveiled a new Add-on that allows Firefox to pinpoint your location based on Wi-Fi signals. The feature, called Geode, is a prototype for the location-tracking technology that will be built into the forthcoming Firefox 3.1. Geode is designed to work with websites that rely on knowing your location, such as mapping and geotagging services. The prospect of Firefox having the ability to track your location raises obvious privacy fears. Mozilla insists users will remain in complete control. 'With Geode, when a website requests your location a notification bar will ask how much information you want to give that site: your exact location, your neighbourhood, your city, or nothing at all,' the Mozilla Labs blog claims."
Why not let it give the user the option of telling the web site some arbitrary location?
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
The addon has to be manually installed.
It's not a piece of malware, it's not surreptitiously installed by remote servers. It's strictly voluntary.
The only privacy concerns which arise from this are if people are not careful enough with the addon to disable it.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
They can already pinpoint your location pretty well using your IP address (and without your permission). So what's the point of this?
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
The default damn well better be "nothing at all" or the lawsuits will be spectacular.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Geode is designed to work with websites that rely on knowing your location, such as mapping, geotagging services, and location-based advertising.
Hey, they've got to be making money off of it somehow.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Just like providing DRM systems, there is the danger, when providing this capacity, for websites to begin to demand it, something they can't easily do now because there's no infrastructure to demand it.
Of course, this is a constant danger/possibility - some days I regret that Javascript was invented because a number of sites don't work at all unless I tell NoScript to allow JS on them. Cost of progress, I guess...
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Does this require each hotspot owner to register the location of his/her hotspot, so that a database can be queried to find the location?
e.g. "I can see access points with MAC addresses 00:60:08:57:3C:D2 and 00:E0:18:77:D6:40 so I know I'm at 37 23.516 -122 02.625.."
How many hotspot owners can be bothered to register their correct location? And re-register it if their IP address changes? How many even change their password?
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
Is there even such a thing anyway?
I hope the Firefox team, Apple, Opera and Google will soon sit down and establish a standard for such things (new metas, new javascript, whatever). Tell Microsoft about it, but don't wait for them.
Also, won't AMD sue for using the Geode name?