Show HN: Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are

Sites like that (without flashy Street View pictures bound to be wrong anyways) have been around for a very long time, many are provided by VPN providers to let their customers check how good they are hidden. It simply showed Amsterdam for me, which is my current VPN-Server, so no surprises there. What I mostly use to check such things <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipleak.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipleak.net&#x2F;</a><p>What he does is only getting the location information and simply cross-referencing it with Google Street View &#x2F; Google Maps Data. That being said: It&#x27;s an art installation <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bengrosser.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;tracing-you&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bengrosser.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;tracing-you&#x2F;</a> to provoke questions about privacy in a more closely connected world than ever. Noble idea.<p>&quot;First it looks up the IP address using ipinfo to obtain geolocation. This is represented as a latitude&#x2F;longitude pair (e.g. 48.8631831,2.3629368) that identifies a precise location on the earth. The latitude&#x2F;longitude is sent to Google, where it queries the Street View, Static Maps, and Javascript Maps data services.&quot;<p>Not too impressive though.

So how does this work? I&#x27;m guessing it uses some sort of geoip database, but those are usually specific to an ISP, so you&#x27;ll end up visitors from the same local ISP show up on the same location. I&#x27;m guessing they add a random (deterministic) bit of noise to each IP to mix things up a bit.

It actually flashed my city, that&#x27;s cool. Now I&#x27;m kinda interested to see all the webcams that are the closest to me.

These aren&#x27;t webcams (as some of the comments mention that)<p>My best guess would be using a geoIP to detect the user&#x27;s city and then using Google Map&#x27;s street view from that city and showcase it for a couple of seconds. The webmaster would have more accurate data if he had asked for HTML5 geo location permission.

This would be cool picture-in-picture at the bottom corner of a busy site. Useful if it had an estimation of accuracy printed too (assume the API gives that?)

It make take several decades but one day google maps satellite view is going to be live&#x2F;realtime.

So the images are the _other_ visitors? I guess then it did find me as it showed my city that one time. Now it&#x27;s only US&#x2F;DE showing up.

For me in Waterloo, Canada it showed a picture of Richmond Hill, which is 118km away. I&#x27;m fine with that :)

I&#x27;m on my phone data, and if puts me on the east coast instead of the west