from Hacker News

Pinpointing your location to Within 690 Meters

by eapen on 4/8/11, 2:36 PM with 12 comments

  • by jedsmith on 4/8/11, 4:36 PM

  • by 16s on 4/8/11, 3:40 PM

    In some densely populated Asian cities, 690 meters will encompass tens of thousands of people.
  • by jdavid on 4/8/11, 4:33 PM

    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.

  • by cpeterso on 4/8/11, 10:09 PM

    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/

  • by lsc on 4/8/11, 9:46 PM

    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.