If you know how to muck with about:config, there is an easy way to set your location manually.  First figure out your longitude and latitude.  There area bunch of tools on the web that gets you this.  Once you have this, you can do the following:

1) Open up about:config

2) search for geo.wifi.uri

3) change the value to:

http://snaptome.appspot.com/loc/json?latitude=your_lat&longitude=your_lon&accuracy=10

Thats it.  I hope this helps.

Opera employees do lots of heavy lifting on standards.  During my involvement at the geolocation working group, I saw first hand the great to work that the Opera folks do (Hi Lars-Erik + Max!).  And it is really great to see that this work be put into a product and shipped.

I spend a bit of time looking at 10.6 and their geo implementation.  The info bar has the basic elements that a geolocation notification bar is suppose to have.  I will leave it to the Opera users to decided if this is a pretty notification bar or not… Notice that they did leave off a informational link that allows a user to get more information each time a geolocation request is performed.  We left that on so that people away can find a way back to the explanation of geolocation.  I also like the wording on the prompt… the browser shares the location data with the web page, but we do not transmit or send data.  It is a minor difference, but if the location is transmitted it is really the page that does it.

The first time you click “Share My Location”, you get a big modal dialog with a bunch of legalize in it that explain what geolocation is, and how it is used in Opera, and what providers, etc.  The text is pretty dense and will probably scare most people away.  I suppose much of the text is similar to the Firefox text.  There are some word smithing that could be done, but its a beta and Opera is probably still working on it.

Under the hood, Opera does use https when transmitting the geolocation data to and from Google’s Location Service.  They also expire the service cookie every two weeks and offer a way for the user to purge this value more frequently.  In my quick conformance tests, it looks like Opera behaves much like Firefox.

Overall, I am pretty happy with Opera’s Geolocation implementation.  Go Opera.  (btw, do I still get a t-shirt for saying that?)

In this trivial example, the object |geolocation| is fully compatible with the W3C’s geolocation object that exists under the navigator object in web content. |successCallback| will be called when Firefox acquires your position.

The prompting of the user is left up to your application. All addons hosted on addons.mozilla.org must follow the guidelines and prompt the user.

If you have questions about what is permissible, please contact me.

The previous day at MetaPlaces, I heard a lot about mobile advertising and the targeting operators can provide. What was most scary for me was the amount of information operators have and their use of this information to place you into a very detailed market segmentation… all of this without your expressed permission…

One company was able to take a two week data drop from an undisclosed operator and tell you the sort of lifestyle, socioeconomic status, age range, and other demographics of the phone owner. The data drop merely consisted of longitudes and latitudes of where the phone was at given times. Following a single phone you are able to known where the person lives, what kind of coffee he drinks, what area the person works, what stores he shops at, what their work hours are like, are they hitting clubs at night or are going home, and do they spend time at the library. And the user is aware that this sort of tracking is happening!

This is wrong. Operators should always be up front about this. The location data is yours. Where you take your phone, like who you call, is personal information.

Recently, a group of privacy advocates are calling on Congress to address some of these concerns. Some of the more interesting requests are:

* Sensitive information should not be collected or used for behavioral tracking or targeting.

* Individuals should be protected even if the information collected about them in behavioral tracking cannot be linked to their names, addresses, or other traditional “personally identifiable information,” as long as they can be distinguished as a particular computer user based on their profile.

* Individuals should have the right to confirm whether a data controller has their personal or behavioral
data, request such data, and delete it.

For more information about this effort, please check out the CDD press release.

The code is pretty simple.  Just something like:

CLLocationManager* locationManager = [[CLLocationManager alloc] init];
locationManager.delegate                = self;
locationManager.desiredAccuracy = kCLLocationAccuracyBest;
[locationManager startUpdatingLocation];

The delagate is just two functions:

- (void)locationManager: (CLLocationManager *)manager
didUpdateToLocation: (CLLocation *)newLocation
fromLocation: (CLLocation *)oldLocation
{
}

- (void)locationManager: (CLLocationManager *)manager
didFailWithError: (NSError *)error
{
}

If you put this in your code, you magically get a prompt that looks like this.  “Untitled” is the name of my application.

Location Request for "Untitled" application

Clicking on the Help icon, you get the following:

Help screenshot

The network requests goes to mac-services.apple.com.  The good news is that it is over a secure network channel.  The bad news is that the content is also hidden from inspection.  (eg.  since this is close source, Apple could be passing anything.  The thing that worries me is that it might be passing the application name which would give unfair Apple insight into what applications are popular).

The accuracy is pretty good — it places me at the building I am working from.  Now where is the support for Geolocation in Safari? 

Apple has provided, with limited documentation, a new public framework called CoreWLAN.  It looks pretty easy to use.  To do a scan of the WIFI access points, you can simply do:

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
#import <CoreWLAN/CoreWLAN.h>

NSError *err = nil;
NSDictionary *params = nil;

NSArray* scan = [NSMutableArray arrayWithArray:[[CWInterface interface] scanForNetworksWithParameters:params error:&err]];

This is all fine and dandy.  However, Firefox uses 10.5, and so using the above code will not compile using the old SDK.  Unfortunately, Apple didn’t provide any C apis – only exposing this objective-C API.  So, what I had to do was some objective-c magic.  Check out the reference (http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ObjCRuntimeRef/Reference/reference.html)

Basically, we needed to be able to dynamically load the CoreWLAN library, that is simple enough:

void *corewlan_library = dlopen(“/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreWLAN.framework/CoreWLAN”,  RTLD_LOCAL);

Now that this library has been loaded, we want to simulate the objective-c call “[CWInterface interface]“.

// get the class
Class CWI_class = objc_getClass(“CWInterface”);
// register the selector name
SEL interfaceSel = sel_registerName(“interface”);
// make the call
id interface = objc_msgSend(CWI_class, interfaceSel);

This mess above is the same as:

id interface = [CWInterface interface];

As you probably can see, it isn’t that hard to do this, just it is syntactically nasty.  Here is the source to the little application I was testing with:

#include <mach-o/dyld.h>
#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#include <objc/objc.h>
#include <objc/objc-runtime.h>

Class CWI_class = objc_getClass(“CWInterface”);
printf(“cwi class %x\n”, CWI_class);

SEL interfaceSel = sel_registerName(“interface”);
printf(“sel: %x\n”, interfaceSel);

SEL scanSel = sel_registerName(“scanForNetworksWithParameters:error:”);
printf(“scanSel: %x\n”, interfaceSel);

id interface = objc_msgSend(CWI_class, interfaceSel);
printf(“interface: %x\n”, interface);

id scanResult = objc_msgSend(interface, scanSel, 0, 0);
printf(“scanResult: %x\n”, scanResult);

Hope this helps.  Please let me know of an easier way, if one exists.

For example, instead only being able to work with:

37.3882005, -122.0834553

You can see the physical address as:

650 Castro St, Mountain View, California, 94041, US

This should help aide the many people that already know their physical address in familiar terms.

To access address elements, you simply do what you have been doing.  The only modification is to test to see if there is an address associated with the position, and if so, access it:

navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(successCallback)
function successCallback(position)
{
    if (position.address)
        alert(position.address.postalCode);
}

Other fields on the address object are:

address.streetNumber
address.street
address.premises
address.city
address.region
address.county
address.countryCode
address.postalCode

Please let me know what you think.

This idea isn’t new. We have been researching meshing geolocation data and the web for a few years. Last year, Mozilla Labs released an experimental addon, Geode, which implemented the draft W3C Geolocation Specification. We added support for the spec to Firefox 3.5 and “Fennec” (our mobile browser which is in development) as well as a user interface that put the user in control of which websites could use location. However, we left it to add-ons to implement the code that would actually figure out your location, using any technique (GPS, WiFi or cell tower triangulation, manual address entry) of their choosing. So, with Firefox 3.1, 3.5 or Fennec, plus a third-party add-on, users would be able to use location-enabled websites.

However, we were still left with a chicken-or-egg problem: unless lots and lots of users installed an add-on, websites wouldn’t have a significant audience for which to develop location-enabled services; and without lots of useful web content using the feature, users had no reason to install an add-on.

We decided to investigate bundling a technology that would provide an end-to-end solution, so that the feature would work out of the box for users, and would give websites a large enough potential user base to kick start the development of innovative apps and services. We had learned a lot from the discussions about the various add-ons that had been built, and in other forums over the last few years. Earlier this year, I hosted a talk on Location in Mozilla during which we reviewed many of the critical privacy issues. We boiled these down to some key principles:
* protecting user privacy.

User privacy is super important to us and we believe that we have the best privacy policies regarding your data. The use of the WiFi data, IP addresses, associated protocol bits, should never be used to spy on users, track individuals, or shared without your permission.

* enabling web developers to use the API in an unencumbered way that would work in all browsers that implement the spec

Web developers can use a standard way of accessing geolocation data and not have to worry about the underlying geolocation provider. We don’t share with third-party location provider(s) any information about websites the user’s visiting; this protects both the user’s privacy, and the website’s right to write to a web standard without fear of any third party gaining insight into how the site is being used.

* preserving user choice

This feature is completely opt-in! If you don’t do anything, geolocation is never used. When a web page wants ask you for your location, you get an dialog similar to the one below. If you do nothing, the feature stays off by default. Only if you press “Tell them”, will you send out your location information. Furthermore, users are free to use a different geolocation provider by installing addons.

* applicability to both Firefox and Fennec

To avoid fragmentation on the web, the geolocation feature should be consistent between the desktop and mobile. The truth really is that the line is getting blurred between mobile and desktop. Calling the geolocation feature “mobile only” discounts many use cases that are pretty important.

Given these principles and a strong desire to create an “out of the box” experience in Firefox and Fennec, and to kick start the location aware web, we are happy to announce that Firefox 3.5 and Fennec will be using Google Location Service. We found that we agreed on the many privacy concerns around location. Do check out Mozilla’s privacy policy and Google’s privacy policy. I am pretty excited about these policies I think they are going to be the industry standard when it comes to network based geolocation providers.

Just to provide a bit of technical detail on what exactly is going on, below I will walk through a simple geolocation request.

1) A user goes to a page that has some Javascript that asks for a Geolocation.

2) When the user loads that page, we put up a dialog.

3) If they don’t click anything, or click no, we do not do any geolocation stuff and simply return an error to the requestor.

4) If they click yes, we drop into this bit of code which packages up the WiFi Access Point data into JSON and sends it to Google Location Services over HTTPS. The URL is configurable by preferences (“geo.wifi.uri”). The data sent includes a version number, access token, and an array of public WiFi access points data. The access token basically acts like a two week cookie, and if you clear cookies in the browser, this value is deleted and a new one is used.

6) Lastly, the Google Location service returns a location. It’s another json object that is an actual location.

That’s it. For more information, check out the Frequently Asked Questions. Get ready for Firefox 3.5 and start thinking about how you can location aware your web apps! Here is the spec.

Got questions, feel free to ask. I am looking for feedback. Comments welcome.

…second party can gain physical access to a user’s phone and enables Latitude without the owner’s knowledge…

if someone has physical access to your phone, they can do whatever they want without your knowledge. I am just not sure how this is any different than me taking your phone, installing a key sniffer and handing it back to you. Is there really a “Major Security Flaw” here?