It simply say "Wikipedia Nearby can't figure out where you are… try again? Try an open area with a better signal." currently while there's window.Geo = {"city":"XXXX","country":"YY","lat":"3.14","lon":"2.71","IP":"10.0.0.1","netmask":"8"} available from http://bits.wikimedia.org/geoiplookup
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
I know this information exists but are there any privacy concerns with doing so? The thing I like about the Geo location API is it asks permission to find you. It seems wrong to me to use the IP lookup in this way without checking first and adding complexity to the experience for small gain.
Yes but this to my knowledge is used in a completely different more subtle way. If a user declines the browser permission to access their location and we show them nearby articles that's just wrong. Showing without any prompt feels a little creepy to me. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
By the way, geoiplookup works to any reasonable precision only while on Wi-Fi, otherwise people will just be getting the "coordinates" of carriers' IP pools.
Had a chat with Arthur and Maryana around this. GeoIP is just not accurate enough to be useful.
On top of this it does come across as creepy to somehow vaguely know a users location without asking them.
Going forward we can build some new features that allow looking up articles nearby an article you are reading and other manual ways of entering locations. This seems a better approach then using IP.
(In reply to comment #5)
On top of this it does come across as creepy to somehow vaguely know a users
location without asking them.
Is this really a serious issue? GeoIP lookup is always done, though users are not told the results if they're not used somewhere.
Although geoip is less accurate I still think the same privacy considerations for geolocation should apply to use of geoip (even though they don't need to).
To quote from the w3 spec:
"A conforming implementation of this specification must provide a mechanism that protects the user's privacy and this mechanism should ensure that no location information is made available through this API without the user's express permission."
http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html#security
I think if we were to use GeoIP it would only be fair to prompt for this.
However the main reason for not using GeoIP is the lack of accuracy.
Considering the support for geolocation [1] I don't see much value in adding a less accurate version of Nearby.