Talk:Location fuzzing
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Pre-post location preview
It might save a lot of worry if we can show a preview of the location data before you actually post, giving the opportunity to turn it off if it's not desired after all.
Compact indicator:
^ then clicking 'Map...' pops out a map and the exact place name and you have a chance to turn it off.
Or, using a line of screen real estate and showing exact found name:
Documentation and help
Whatever we do to clean up the opt-in experience, we should also have a decent doc page explaining how to get back out. Where this is an upstream issue (browser config) ideally there should be upstream documentation we can link to rather than documenting their product in detail for them.
Several of the below are going to be false positives due to the ajax IP lookup fallback that snuck into js/geometa.js. This does an IP-based lookup without any user permission prompting on browsers that support neither the HTML 5 native nor Gears location APIs. Needs to either be removed, or have a prompt added under our control.
| browser | supports location | opt-in prompt | opt-out control | fuzz control |
| IE 8 raw | no | - | - | - |
| IE 8+Gears | yes | yes | yes | ? |
| Firefox 3.5 | yes | yes | yes | ? |
| Camino 2/Mac | yes | no | no | ? |
| Chrome/Win | yes | yes | yes | ? |
| Chrome/Mac | yes | no | no | ? |
| Chrome/Lin | yes | no | no | ? |
| Safari/iPhone OS 3 | yes | yes* | yes* | ? |
| Safari/Mac OS X 10.6 | issue with jQuery Gears | — | — | ? |
Disabling geolocation in browsers after having opted in (upstream):
- Firefox 3.5
- 'View' menu -> 'Page Info' -> 'Permissions' tab
- Upstream doc: http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/
- IE 8 + Gears
- 'Tools' menu -> 'Gears settings' item
- Chrome
- 'Options' menu -> 'Under the Hood' tab -> 'Gears settings' button
- Gears settings are missing from Mac and Linux versions; no opt-in prompt either
- iPhone/Mobile Safari
- opt-in prompt is a modal dialog
- can disable Location Services for entire device at Settings -> General -> Location Services
- can remove all location permission whitelist entries at Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset Location Warnings (will have to opt back in to any other apps or web pages)
Removing already-recorded locations (on our site):
- delete your individual notices to stop them showing up on the map
- but note if they've been copied out to other services, they might have copied that location out via OMB -- if so you can't delete them from those sites
- enhancement: Consider an option to strip location from your old notices without deleting them?
Accuracy levels
The browser geolocation API returns an accuracy radius along with coordinates, which may be quite large -- 22km for my case for an IP-based geo lookup in Firefox 3.5. If we did our own fuzzing, this would also introduce an accuracy range.
Our current name lookups have problems with this in that you may get a very accurate name for a location that's several km away from you, which is additionally confusing to users. (Over-accuracy to the "right" place is scary, over-accuracy to the "wrong" place is confusing and may mislead readers.) I'd rather have it say "San Francisco" than have it point directly to "Opera Plaza, San Francisco" when I'm somewhere between 0 to 22km away from Opera Plaza!
FireEagle uses an explicit notion of location hierarchy to return useful name info for non-exact locations.
Negativity
One big thing I want to avoid is over-focus on the negativity. Geolocation is a useful feature for our users. It is not nuclear waste material. There's only so much we have to do to protect people from themselves. --Evan 16:36, 24 December 2009 (UTC)
- Indeed... making the experience clearer will not only help with negative reactions, it'll also help more people to notice and make use of the location feature! --brion 01:46, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
Pref discussion notes
- checkbox below location in profile settings
- 'Share my current location when posting notices'
- control saving of geotag info from *whatever* source
- default to on -- maintain current default behavior
- stash prefs into its own table: user_location_prefs [can then be extended as necessary]
Future other improvements:
- clean up accuracy levels on names lookups -- only use PPL and above?
- maybe a way to strip geo tags from existing notices (cf twitter's button to do this globally)
- not-too-invasive indicator of what's going to be posted at post time and allow one-time opt-out (per pre-post section above]
