John Layt wrote:
On 1 July 2014 11:31, Per Jessen
wrote: John Layt wrote:
For example, Google Maps wants to be able to display where you are accurate to within a few meters, other websites may just want your city or country to influence your search results. Well behaved browsers like Firefox will respect your privacy and will ask you first before providing this information to a random unknown website. It is true that a website can try guess your location from your IP address, but this is usually only accurate to country level or sometimes city level and is often wrong so is rarely accurate enough for most use cases. They get better results by asking the browser to use the local device facilities to give them the accuracy level they require.
This is the interesting bit then - what does my browser know about my location?
It knows whatever the OS knows and is willing to tell the browser about.
Sure, but what kind of information are we talking about? I don't imagine my openSUSE knows much more about my location than it's private (RFC1918) IP-address. For a smartphone with all the nifty little devices (compass, gps, wifi, accelerometer, altimeter etc), I imagine there is lots of info to be had.
When returning the location, the browser can make use of various device facilities
I guess we're primarily talking about devices other than plain Linux PCs?
Mostly, but most laptops and many desktops have wifi, and some have 3G/4G/GPS built-in or as dongles, so the browser has to assume that it can get highly detailed and possibly personally sensitive information that you may not want shared with any random website, so it has to ask you first to be safe.
I've only seen the browser ask this once or twice, but as I'm pretty certain my browser knows very little about my location (apart from what can be determined/deduced from my IPv4 address), I just got curious. Does anyone happen to know which Javascript API causes the browser to ask? -- Per Jessen, Zürich (20.2°C) http://www.hostsuisse.com/ - virtual servers, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org