[AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

[Pinkerton, Eric]

My understanding of Geolocation is that it looks at the wifi nodes your computer can see, and makes a best guess - based upon where else a combination of those SSID's exist. (I think I remember reading about some researchers who were able to fool it by advertising a range of SSID's available somewhere else)

So if the list of SSID's in your locale consists of common ones, say NETGEAR or DLINK, or you don't have a wifi connection at all obviously it's going to be harder/impossible to guess so it has to fall back on your ip address which is far less specific.

Interestingly If you have a phone with a GPS installed, then it can also make use of the coordinates provided by that, and in this instance I imagine it would be possible to also grab the list of SSID's visible, and further augment the SSID/Geolocation Database....

What does your browser say about you?