On 1 July 2014 08:01, Per Jessen
Just wondering out loud - why is Firefox occasionally asking me for permission to share information that the webserver will have (or have access to) any way?
By default, Firefox uses Google Location Services to determine your location by sending:
your computer’s IP address, information about the nearby wireless access points, and a random client identifier, which is assigned by Google, that expires every 2 weeks.
All Firefox has is my (private) IP-address, so why bother asking when the webserver knows it too??
Requestiing your geolocation is part of the HTML5 standard, where a website requests from your browser where you are so it can give you a better service (or more targeted and thus profitable advertising). 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. When returning the location, the browser can make use of various device facilities to guess your location with decreasing levels of accuracy, usualy working from GPS to known cell towers to known wifi access points to simple IP address. The browser can implement all this code itself, or use the host OS facilities, or use something like Googles online services. I know Mozilla are working on their own location database of cell phone towers and wifi access points so they can stop sending so much data to Google (see https://location.services.mozilla.com/). John. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org