Slashdot Mirror
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."
And twice as annoying.
Excuse me while I install this on my son's laptop ... without him knowing.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm wearing my tinfoil underwear.
Oh crap, this means I need to wear underwear at the computer.
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."
I sure hope Best Buy still sells that 2-mile long ethernet cable...
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
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!!
Gee! It says I'm at work. Like I'd be anywhere else at this time of the day.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/10/introducing-geode/
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.
Is this IP address driven? Is this mostly for public hotspots? Will one be able to register their home Wifi signal?
Will one be able to register their neighbors unsecured wifi signal?
Will there be reverse look uo p for public hotspots? How about "Public" hotspots?
Eschew Obfuscation
just tried to install it to see what it's like, but won't install on i386/Ubuntu
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.
Because the Dept of Homeland Spying would get misleading info on your whereabouts.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
If a service can offer a better experience if it knows my location without having to login and identify myself, it is useful in many scenarios. For example, advertising a deal or a offering a coupon for an item in a nearby store. But like any technology, it can definitely be abused.
There are a few problems with WiFi based location estimation. For example, the SSID may change or vanish. Secondly, it can easily be abused by reporting false location. On the contrary, it can work indoors unlike most commercial GPS'es.
This technology gained attention with the Place Lab (http://www.placelab.org/) initiative.
Now I know exactly where Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is!
This plug-in is simply not appropriate for slashdot. /off to try it under WINE
Then I'll create a GUI interface in Visual Basic and see if I can track an IP address
Yeah, Xtify doesn't have a browser dependency. It has a Blackberry dependency. And only three other phone types are in the release schedule.
Like they're saying you'll be able to control the feature but there's a good chance they're lying? What's with the casting of doubt on their "real" intentions? Slash. could at least try to keep the tinfoil hats out of product announcements -- save it for the politicians.
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?
From the included LICENSE.TXT:
"The XPCom component contained within the contents of this extension is licensed by
Skyhook Wireless, Inc. ("Skyhook") and are subject to the Skyhook license and
terms of use (the "Skyhook License"); you may not use this component except
in compliance with the Skyhook License.
You may obtain a copy of the Skyhook License at [need URL]"
I didn't look long, but I could not find any "Skyhook License" on Skyhook's website (which is I guess why they chose not to fill in the URL!). I certainly would not use a product for which the license was in question like this, especially considering the proprietary, binary-only DLLs they provide. Not that I would be able to try it out, since it only includes 32-bit Windows and Mac libraries, no Linux at all.
Buyer beware, as they say...
If they have this kind of geolocation information about where Wifi access points are, they probably have the ability to track you down to at least a neighborhood just knowing your IP address for an awful lot of WAPs in their database.
So even without this plugin, if you use public Wifi you're giving a fair amount of information about your location to the sites you visit.
What, am I worried about this? No. Should I be?
There are other ways to approximate your location when you aren't using wi-fi. As an example, http://www.geobytes.com/ipLocator.htm will give you a location derived from your ISP's. Also, a way to set a location in your Firefox profile would be useful for desktop PCs that rarely move. And I should note that Ubiquity is currently using the MaxMind geo-api (http://www.maxmind.com/app/api) for very similar purposes.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Every day at midnight, the geode add on wakes your laptop and sends a very quick communication to a database online. The database is simple. Geode identifier and a y/n column for has your computer been stolen? If a user has reported his laptop stolen the connection stays on and local authorities are notified.
And this has been another installament of Captain Obvious!
And thus marks the end my my upgrade path with Firefox. It's been nice, so long and thanks for all the fish!
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I know somewhere on the web there's a nationwide wi-fi map, with every point listing their name. I checked my house, and there was my AP. So yeah, pretty slick making software from that data.
Double edged sword here: yes, privacy concerns, but if your laptop gets stolen & the thief is at a documented area, go in for the retrieval!
muahaha
I've been using the Loki plugin for Firefox on Mac for some time. It uses the Skyhook wifi triangulation system (as seen in iPhone 1.0 geolocation) - isn't this just the same thing?
http://www.loki.com
I doubt they will be able to get an accurate estimation of your location. It would be cool, but I doubt it. I guess i'll give it a try later today.
"The prospect of Firefox having the ability to track your location raises obvious privacy fears."
What I fear more is Firefox becoming everything but what people need it to be. You know, a web browser.
Please wake me up when someone decides to fork FF and remove all the useless crap that's being added lately. We're far from what made many of us tech-savvy people switch to what used to be a lightweight, efficient and secure web browser.
____
nico
Nico-Live
Seriously, I think it's great. My web browser should not only track my location, but I'd also like to see the ability to compile C++ code, format my hard drive, and make coffee.
Oh, wait. Somebody already wrote vim! In that case, I"m baffled - why are we finding ways to add more bloat to a browser that used to advertise how lightweight it was?
Yeah, Xtify doesn't have a browser dependency. It has a Blackberry dependency. And only three other phone types are in the release schedule.
Actually, Xtify's supported platforms: Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, iPhone make up only 90.3% of the smartphone market.
'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."
I would like to later ask Geode for the lists of web sites I've set to my exact location, neighbourhood, city, or nothing at all.
I create these settings and forget them. The cloud should not only remember what I set for the Web sites, but for me whenever I want to check,
It would be great if Mozilla, or somebody else, would make a light version of Firefox, which only had web browsing. It could be extendable, so that user's could have just what they want, and not a lot of feature creep. Perhaps they could call it Phoenix, or Firebird.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
To be fair, none but the Blackberry seems to be out so far.
http://failblog.org/2008/10/03/marriott-fail/
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
So, what is the point? What is the point in having it determine where you are by WiFi signal? Why not enter it manually? In fact, if it is at the websites discretion, why even have this at all? It seems like there is not just the potential for abuse, that is the only rational reason to include I can think of; that it is designed for abuse. Am I missing something?
Further, I don't understand what is going through the heads of the coders over at Mozilla. It is a customizable browser. It can be added on to. That is the only reason to even continue using gecko for christ's sake. Wasn't the original point of Firefox, or Netscape before it, to be a lightweight, standards compliant browser? I have an idea that could realize that goal: STOP BUILDING MORE STUPID SHIT IN.
Time to switch to Iceweasel.
im guessing google maps would use this like it currently uses the GPS feature in an iPhone 3G
raises privacy concerns. C'mon people, this privacy at all costs meme is getting a little extreme. This add-on is for people who want to be tracked! Most people who DL Firefox are smart enough not to enable this add-on. For those that aren't should a cool feature not be added to protect people from themselves? Then let's ban guns too (no, let's not).
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Microsoft had a WiFi geo locator utility and web application several years ago, and abandoned it because people that cared where they were would just use the GPS in their phones, as it was consumer utility to find local information.
I don't think a utility that reports back where you are will be any more successful, and a bit scary.
You gotta sleep sometime you know. You are lucky.
Blar.
Thanks to wireless hotspots, you don't even need that anyway. 99% of hotspots send your personal data in the clear.
I really like the ability to use location detection either through Wifi or cell triangulation like many phones. But I worry that this being a default install in Firefox will lead to hackers targetting this feature, which IMHO is quite a scary prospect. Leave it as an add-on and I will surely install it, otherwise I might wait to see how this whole thing pans out security-wise before I upgrade.
wut
Does this imply a fix to the "We're sorry, but the TV show episode you wish to view is not available from your location." annoyance?
Yeah, it will be so easy to track 192.168.1.xxx, right. Use a server to geolocate it like all those annyoing sigs in PHPBB "your ip is blah and you're using firefox on a hackintosh so I know where you live!!!11"
What's new?
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.