Pinpointing your location to Within 690 Meters (opens in new tab)

(schneier.com)

53 pointseapen15y ago12 comments

12 comments

12 comments · 5 top-level

16s15y ago· 4 in thread

In some densely populated Asian cities, 690 meters will encompass tens of thousands of people.

A circle with a 690 meters radius is about half a square mile. The top 50 most densely populated cities according to Wikipedia all have over 20,000 people per half square mile, and that includes lots of European cities and even one in the United States:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...

ZitchDog15y ago

As well as hundreds of local businesses who would pay quite a bit to advertise to them directly.

16s15y ago

Right, but my point was if you are trying to find that one person 690 meters probably won't help much.

travisp15y ago

On the other hand, it says that 690 meters is the average. I wonder if the accuracy is higher or lower in more densely populated areas. My uneducated guess is that it would be higher and that you'd actually have a more accurate location for densely populated cities.

jdavid15y ago· 3 in thread

I think this is an amazing idea. On the upside it could allow people to micro-target services.

On the down-side it will allow people to micro-target without peoples permission.

Like anything this is a tool, that can either be used for good or evil. With great power comes great responsibility.

I think the service can become more accurate overtime as it establishes more known locations. Each known location could be used to determine the n+1.

cj15y ago

How could micro-targeting be evil, besides the creep-factor?

pavel_lishin15y ago

I break into a site you use often and get a lot of personal information on you, but not enough; I can see approximately where you live, and go through your trash to finish up my collection (e.g., rifling through garbage to find SSNs, etc.)

chadgeidel15y ago

If you look at my IP, I'm working in Delaware, but I'm actually sitting in Colorado Springs. It's not evil, but I'm not gonna be too happy if you advertise a "local" deal.

jedsmith15y ago

Presented at USENIX NSDI.

Abstract: http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/techAbstracts.html#...

Paper: http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yo...

cpeterso15y ago

Geolocation using Wi-Fi BSSID/MAC addresses is probably more accurate and reliable.

WiGLE is a crowd-sourced database of the GPS positions of over 33M Wi-Fi BSSID/MAC addresses from around the world.

http://wigle.net/gps/gps/Map/onlinemap2/

lsc15y ago

oh god, so this means that because I'm hosting a VPS for some italian, they think that prgmr.com is in italy? it sounds like an even worse idea than looking at the address in the whois.

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