The "P" Word? You Know, Privacy & Psecurity.

From the I-know-where-you-were-last-night dept and Slashdot: “Mozilla Labs has unveiled a new Add-on that allows Firefox to pinpoint your location based on Wi-Fi signals. The feature, called Geode, is a prototype for the location-tracking technology that will be built into the forthcoming Firefox 3.1. Geode is designed to work with websites that rely on knowing your location, such as mapping and geotagging services.

The prospect of Firefox having the ability to track your location raises obvious privacy fears. Mozilla insists users will remain in complete control. ‘With Geode, when a website requests your location a notification bar will ask how much information you want to give that site: your exact location, your neighbourhood, your city, or nothing at all,’ the Mozilla Labs blog claims.”

The first thing that pops into my head is that the default behavior of this add on should be to not do anything; The second one is that this add-on should not be bundled with the basic Firefox installation, or at the very least not installed without a user’s explicit consent.

And then there are the problems associated with entrusting a stranger(s) with a profit motive to hold your location data and hoping that they’ll defend unethical or illegal access to it.  That’s always a dicey proposition.

Given the above, I’d categorize this kind of location-based innovation as possibly maybe neato, but definitely not necessary.  At all.

Of course, that’s just one crusty olde farte’s opinion – one who’s survived quite nicely without this kind of gee-wizary and who actually remembers life before the internet.  Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there were enough pirates out there to stave off global warming…