

Pinpointing your location to Within 690 Meters - eapen
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/pinpointing_a_c.html

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jedsmith
Presented at USENIX NSDI.

Abstract:
[http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/techAbstracts.html#...](http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/techAbstracts.html#Wang_Yong)

Paper:
[http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yo...](http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yong.pdf)

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16s
In some densely populated Asian cities, 690 meters will encompass tens of
thousands of people.

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

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16s
Right, but my point was if you are trying to find that one person 690 meters
probably won't help much.

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jdavid
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.

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

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pavel_lishin
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.)

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cpeterso
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/>

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lsc
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.

