Pinpointing your location to Within 690 Meters

Presented at USENIX NSDI.<p>Abstract: <a href="http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/techAbstracts.html#Wang_Yong" rel="nofollow">http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/techAbstracts.html#...</a><p>Paper: <a href="http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yong.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Wang_Yo...</a>

In some densely populated Asian cities, 690 meters will encompass tens of thousands of people.

I think this is an amazing idea. On the upside it could allow people to micro-target services.<p>On the down-side it will allow people to micro-target without peoples permission.<p>Like anything this is a tool, that can either be used for good or evil. With great power comes great responsibility.<p>I think the service can become more accurate overtime as it establishes more <i>known</i> locations. Each <i>known</i> location could be used to determine the n+1.

Geolocation using Wi-Fi BSSID/MAC addresses is probably more accurate and reliable.<p>WiGLE is a crowd-sourced database of the GPS positions of over 33M Wi-Fi BSSID/MAC addresses from around the world.<p><a href="http://wigle.net/gps/gps/Map/onlinemap2/" rel="nofollow">http://wigle.net/gps/gps/Map/onlinemap2/</a>

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.