Re: Suggesting tiles by region with finer granularity than country

On Friday, April 24, 2015 at 10:58:46 AM UTC-7, Chris Hofmann wrote:
> If the new tile page wants to comply with the location API then maybe it
> should be asking the "this page wants to know you location?" question.
Firefox is not sending geolocation data to our servers, so that's part of the reason why there isn't a location prompt. The servers are guessing a location based on IP addresses.

Using the geolocation API would provide much more detailed location information (lat/long). Whether we should use the API and if Firefox needs to ask the user's permission from a chrome context is a whole separate conversation that I don't think we need to get into now. (Although using the API would address some issues like VPN IP addresses confusing our servers.)

> have we thought about ways the user can share their choice about what
> level of location precision gets shared with the tiles system
That's a fair question as one of the main reasons why we're getting into the advertising space is to give better controls to users. Even though technically, IP addresses are automatically sent to our servers (i.e., no real choice to not send other than turning things off), we can indeed provide choice to users that we would honor from the server. But we also don't want to confuse users with too many choices, so we'll need to prioritize which finer grained choices should be made available to users vs providing coarse "turn off all."

> What's the level of location targeting that are used in a sample of Ad
> network targeting?
I would guess existing ad tech will try to use as much data as possible from various sources. For example, Verizon as an advertiser could know all the locations you've been to with your smartphone, and Google as a publisher wanting to show an ad could use its data about previous maps searches, and this is all combined with the current request that includes your IP address.

Tiles can't do that because we don't use unique identifiers, so data can't be linked up to those other sources.

But even if we strip away all that additional data and focus on just IP address mapping to location, I'm pretty sure ad networks use as detailed resolution as possible they're confident of the data. If there's data (even if inaccurate), someone will use it.

Here's a tool to check what data various geolocation providers think of your current IP address: http://www.iplocation.net/ A quick glance shows Country, Region/State, City, ISP, Latitude, Longitude, Time Zone, Postal Code, Area Code.