[Geowanking] MS local.live.com & privacy (lack of)

[Kevin Elliott]

Excellent post, I agree with you 100%!

Kevin

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Liebhold" <mnl at well.com>
To: <geowanking at lists.burri.to>
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 1:39 PM
Subject: [Geowanking] MS local.live.com & privacy (lack of)


>I took a look yesterday at Microsofts new Virtual Earth incarnation, called 
>local.live .com. <http://local.live.com/>
>
> I won't write a full review here. Anyone interested can take a look 
> themselves.  Beyond the irritating, unblockable CSS-like popups, There 's 
> a critical point about Microsoft's handling of sensive location 
> information that's worth immediate comment here:
>
> The service includes a feature called "locate me" which launches a 
> Placelab-like wifi base-station geolocation technique.called 'Location 
> Finder" which listens for the MAC address and compares it to a client 
> cache of locations of known base stations. Placelab, which was developed 
> by Intel Labs, is available free for download on sourceforge, and as many 
> people may know, was explicitly designed by Intel to be 'privacy 
> observant'. Unlike most e-911  and mobile phone location systems which 
> sureveil, and actively track a users location, Placelab was designed to 
> present location coordinates privately to a user, without querying, or 
> notifying the network. IMHO this is a noble design goal.
>
> Microsoft's "Location Finder" program, on the other hand, includes the 
> following disclaimer in the terms and conditions link which says " Your 
> privacy is important to us. click here 
> <http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=51332&clcid=0x409> to see our 
> privacy policy:"
>
> [snip]
> "Use of Location Information ... Microsoft may use the information 
> collected to provide you with more effective customer service, to improve 
> Location Finder and any related Microsoft products or services,...
>
> Microsoft may disclose location information if required to do so by law or 
> in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to (a) conform to 
> the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Microsoft; 
> (b) protect and defend the rights or property of Microsoft and our family 
> of Web sites; or (c) act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal 
> safety of Microsoft employees or agents, users of Microsoft products or 
> services, or members of the public.
>
> Location information collected by Location Finder may be stored and 
> processed in the United States or any other country in which Microsoft or 
> its affiliates, subsidiaries or agents maintain facilities. "
>
> [snip]
>
> So much for privacy of Microsoft's  'Location finder' program.
> If this is unpalatable to you, you may be interested in trying as I did 
> an alternate location techique. Instead of 'Location Finder' 
> local.live.com also offers users a choice to select IP location lookup. As 
> discussed here in the past, IP geolocation is an imperfect art, dependent 
> of the accuracy of the data in the offical IANA database ( Internet 
> Assigned Numbers Authority.)  In my case, my IP address has shown that am 
> in San Diego, since that's where my IP connection is officially terminated 
> at the downlink center for my satellite service provider. I'm actually 
> connected to the Internet via a KuBand satellite in the remote wilds of 
> Northern California, a long ways away. The location of my dish is simply 
> not visible to the net.  It looks, to the net, like I'm in San Diego, over 
> 700 miles south.
>
> So, you might understand that I was quite suprised and dismayed that 
> Microsoft's IP lookup returned my actual location in the woods in Northern 
> California !!!  Just to be sure they didn't get my address from my 
> satellite service provider, I called the Network Operations Center, who 
> said the location of my dish is  private, but looked up my record anyway, 
> and confirmed " Our database, and the IANA database show your IP address 
> is in San Diego.  Clearly Microsoft's IP location database includes spooky 
> datamined information about users' actual location that is not normally 
> available by querying the publically accessible databases.
>
> Be forewarned.
>
>
> Mike
>
>
> Mike Liebhold
> Senior Researcher
> Institute for the Future
>
> iftf.org <http://www.iftf.org>  |   starhill.us <http://starhill.us>   | 
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>
>
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