Firefox 3.5 is "location-aware" | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 3.5 is "location-aware"

en-us.www.mozilla.com

How the hell does it know my nearby access points? I'm running it on Ubuntu. Sure, it's possible, but how does it have access to this information? Does it contain code to access every wifi-manager API in existence?

Yeah, I was blown away by this as well. I'm guessing the ip address is enough. Google Chrome pinpointed my location down to the apartment block. Kind of scary, actually.

That's not the whole story. I'm based in Copenhagen but for some reason my IP belongs to a Swedish batch, so I'm constantly being served Swedish ads instead of Danish ones. This service got my location right to within 100 meters. Also, I have a 3G wireless connection that plugs into my laptop, so that I can take it anywhere. There's noway that an IP address can convey my exact location.

Same thing with me. I'm in Amsterdam, and whenever I turn AdBlock off to experience the web it its full glory (rarely), all the IP-based targeted ads think I'm in weird places (generally still in Holland, occasionally in Germany).

The center of the circle on the map was about 4 meters to the left of where I am sitting on the couch, and the circle encompasses my block and nothing more.

Amazing.

Interesting... its possible though that the ip mapping data that google uses is different\more accurate from the ones used by ad delivery companies. My notebook was on my local wireless network unconnected to anything else and it found my location. I can't think of any way its doing that other than ip address. And even with a 3G wireless, Chrome\Firefox almost certainly doesn't have access to your cell tower location information, right?

Is there a way for it not to guess my position? I happen to have a desktop computer that´s very hard to move.

How do I turn off Location-Aware Browsing permanently?

Location-Aware Browsing is always opt-in in Firefox 3.5. No location information is ever sent without your permission. If you wish to disable the feature completely, please follow this set of steps:

    * In the URL bar, type about:config
    * Type geo.enabled
    * Double click on the geo.enabled preference
    * Location-Aware Browsing is now disabled

To select on a site-by-site basis: select Tools>Page info>Permissions.

I think he meant, how do you tell your browser exactly where you are.

The feature "display my position" is available in Google Maps. It is not when I use Safari 4.0.

Is anyone else getting funky results with this? It always returns 40.75, -73.997 (New York City) as my location, but I'm in Toronto.

I always get incorrect results for anything that uses the location feature in Firefox 3.5. This time it put me in Chicago, but I've been put in NYC and San Francisco before as well. I'm NEVER in the correct location (Pittsburgh). I'm running Ubuntu for what it's worth. You would think that it would do a reverse DNS on the IP at least to make sure it gets the city correct...

What network are you on, if your access is via a corporate net then perhaps your connection is being tunneled to another location first; or maybe it's picking up a proxy server address?

Any resources on how to leverage this? Their FAQ offers no info for developers.

Code from Google: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-location-servi...

W3C spec - http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_geolocation

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