On: Facebook: The Normalization of What Should Never H...

[dleslie]

Geo IP is a reasonable last resort; it'll usually show at least what city you're in.

The images you upload may have location data on them.

If you're using a wireless hotspot then your location is correlated to anyone who also used it while sharing GPS data.

And so on.

[raspasov → dleslie]

"If you're using a wireless hotspot then your location is correlated to anyone who also used it while sharing GPS data."

That's a clever one I hadn't thought about. I guess for a service like Facebook/Instagram/Google it can work decently well given the scale/adoption.

[chrischen → raspasov]

That's in fact how your GPS works most of the time. They triangulate it based on a scan of SSIDs assuming access points are usually fixed. Both Apple and Google use this method.