Opera tells dev build where you are
Following in the footsteps of Mozilla and the latest Firefox beta, Opera Software has released a developer build of its Norwegian web browser that knows where you are. The new Opera "technology preview" includes the W3C's Geolocation API, a way for websites to request your physical location - and for you to give it. If you think …
What about an exploit that bypasses the confirmation?
I don't want a browser with this huge risk to my security and privacy.
So, is this why -- for this entire month I've been in Mexico -- Firefox 3.x has been ignoring my request to go the the English version of Google, even after clicking the "Google In English" link on the auto-loaded Spanish Google homepage that I get when Google reads my IP address and sees that I'm in Mexico and automatically assumes I'm a native Spanish speaker?
I finally got fed up and went back to Firefox 2. At least it does what I friggin' tell it to do when I click on the link that says "Google.com in English" instead of blowing me off and redirecting me to the goddamn' Spanish page.
I've been doing a few web apps recently that need your location to give you the address of your nearest branch, so having a facility to automatically get the user's location and skip a step for their data entry sounds great. Sadly though, unless IE supports it it's not going to be much use to 75% of web users (I think that's the current IE install base).
GIven the current pace of Firefox development, I bet Opera still gets it into a shipping product first, and working better.
@No1 Anonymous Coward
Well, the way around that would be to just not tell the software where you are in the first place. If you don't have a GPS integrated into your hardware, and you don't tell it where you are, it's down to IP geolocation, which any potential exploit would be able to get anyway. Y'know. From your IP address.
I could see at least one interesting use for captured Geolocation data in exploiting though. Speeding up password bruteforcing by only using wordlists in the targets native language being the obvious one.
Geolocation may work at least in so far as the country you are in, but try to go more granular than that and it's hopeless. It all depends on how your ISP allocates it's IP addresses. Geolocation services don't even place me in the right county let alone the right city, so any reviews for supposedly local companies would be absolutely no use to me.
Geolocation as it stands is totally unreliable.
My guess is that this feature will realliy come into it's own for mobile devices that already have the ability to triangulate and/or have inbuilt GPS. Hence why Opera is so anxious to support it, as their share of the mobile browser market is much higher than their share of the desktop market.
Get this standardized, and get support in enough mobile browsers, and this could be very useful, especially for social networking apps and shopping. And perhaps localized mobile advertising...opted-in of course.
Clearly you don't have a clue what you are talking about. Try the Opera WinGoggi build, it tries several methods to determine location, the IP is the LAST method it tries, when all others fail.
