Comment by myztic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myztic | Hacker News Reader

Sites like that (without flashy Street View pictures bound to be wrong anyways) have been around for a very long time, many are provided by VPN providers to let their customers check how good they are hidden. It simply showed Amsterdam for me, which is my current VPN-Server, so no surprises there. What I mostly use to check such things https://ipleak.net/

What he does is only getting the location information and simply cross-referencing it with Google Street View / Google Maps Data. That being said: It's an art installation http://bengrosser.com/projects/tracing-you/ to provoke questions about privacy in a more closely connected world than ever. Noble idea.

"First it looks up the IP address using ipinfo to obtain geolocation. This is represented as a latitude/longitude pair (e.g. 48.8631831,2.3629368) that identifies a precise location on the earth. The latitude/longitude is sent to Google, where it queries the Street View, Static Maps, and Javascript Maps data services."

Not too impressive though.

One more thought: I seriously hope the artist clarifies the shortcomings of his approach when presenting it! It wouldn't be right to suggest to people that the locations are highly accurate.

I can imagine a non-technical relative/friend of mine seeing such an installation, then telling me that you can track down every internet user accurately and even show the building he is living in and me having to explain why that is not the case and a ridiculous notion.

No matter how noble the cause, deception is wrong. After all, I don't tell my kids their heads may explode if they take illegal drugs...

Nobody is being deceptive. From the "about" link on the site:

"... Sometimes what this image shows is eerily accurate; other times it is wildly dislocated. ... How accurate are the system’s data sources and when might they improve?"

And more from the artist's page about the project:

"... How close it gets is very much dependent on how networks are built, configured, operated, and distributed where you are, which network you use, and the accuracy of the data associated with those networks."

Quite aware of that, but I was referring to something different: I hope the same information is available to the people seeing (that is: experiencing live) the art installation (or past tense because it already happened?!).

I don't know how it was/is/will be presented to those people.

I also want to clarify that I did not accuse anybody of any wrongdoing, just said "I seriously hope ..." based on my experience with non-technical people misinterpreting technical stuff (or non-scientific people misinterpreting science,... and so forth).

It can be more accurate - although modern browsers require you to grant location access permission.

Pasting this into the javascript console of a browser (just tested in Chrome and Safari):

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos){console.log(pos)})

Then feeding the latitude and longitude into Streetview it gives me (after granting location permission) the front door of the building next door.

Note that if you can come up with a convincing explanation for why an unsuspecting user should click the location request popup, this'll defeat the VPN as a means of hiding your location... "Click here and allow location access to see hot girls ready to meet in your area!"

> navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos){console.log(pos)})

Hail Firefox! It asks me for a permission, even when I paste that code in the console and try to execute it.

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