Angus Kidman08 October 2008, 3:56 PM
A new Firefox extension brings PCs knowledge that mobile phones and GPS systems have had for some time — where the user of that machine is located.
Geode, an experimental extension for users of Firefox, works out your location based on data supplied by your ISP via Skyhook's Loki service, effectively turning your PC into a kind of low-rent GPS. The software uses the W3C Geolocation Specification, so there's a reasonable chance that it will be adopted by site developers (and not turn into another failed concept like so many 3D Web implementations, for instance). Future versions of Firefox will incorporate the feature so it won't need to be installed as a separate add-on.
In the current release, there are some major restrictions — the most notable being that you have to be using a Wi-Fi connection to get it to work at all. Ideally, the technology would adopt data from a range of sources. For example, if I'm using a mobile broadband service, for instance, then phone tower information should come into play.
As it stands, even on a Wi-Fi connection I was unable to get the service to locate me in an Australian airport, which likely reflects the lack of Australian coverage by Loki's Wi-Fi location service -- however, in another test at a residential home, it pinpointed the exact location nearly perfectly, despite only two WiFi networks being in range (one of which was APC's test network).
Despite those flaws, there are plenty of other opportunities if the technology sorts out those early glitches and gets widely adopted. "The potential here is for more than just [nearby] restaurant lookups," notes the post from Firefox Mozilla, which develops Firefox, announcing the service. "For example, imagine an RSS reader that knows the difference between home and work and automatically changes its behaviour appropriately. Or a news site whose local section is, in fact, actually local. Or Web site authentication that only allows you to login from certain physical locations, like your house."
At the same time, privacy advocates are likely to kick up a stink over the ability for any web site to make a decent guess at where its visitors are coming from. Making the feature opt-in seems a likely minimum requirement to deal with those complaints — even in the current trial version, it asks you to confirm before sharing location information. Advertising services already use rudimentary IP grouping to target ads, but specific local services would presumably command an even higher premium.