I’ve posted before about better pin-pointing of location from devices on the move - and it’s a subject that has long been close to my heart. But thanks to AdViking to drawing my attention to Greg Sterling’s post last week about the inclusion of Geo-tagging in Windows 7.

It’s a natural development from Geode’s firefox plug in - and will further refine the capabilities of tools like Feedjit I noted before.

But this really is going to be an interesting one to watch on the privacy boards: if your operating system will be able to pinpoint your (fairly) precise location - and you’re on, say, a corporate network - then the implications for employers (for example) to check up on all kinds of things gets much more potent.

Now, let’s put this together with some of the commentary last week on Google’s decision to use searches related to ‘flu’ to identify areas where epidemics might arise. One of the more interesting responses came from The Register:

“The problem, (Marc) Rotenberg says, is that data aggregation calls attention to specific data stored on Google’s servers, making it that much more vulnerable to, say, a subpoena or a national security letter. “Let’s say that instead of Flu Trends, Google’s doing SARS Trends - tracking a very serious communicable disease,” he explains. “If there’s a big SARS upsurge somewhere, the government would be at Google’s door asking where did that data come from.” “

So this goes a step further: it’s not just about what you type into Google, I wonder if this could lead to any information on your computer being fed back to the authorities and then triangulated back to a pretty accurate location. What will the privacy/amnesty international take on that be? I watch with interest…

Tags: EPIC, feedjit, firefox, flu trends, geode, google, mozilla labs, windows 7

I was checking out the latest from over at Cheeze’s excellent marketing blog and spotted, almost incidentally, a really cool app sitting in the sidebar: ‘Live Visitor Feed‘ by Feedjit.

Apart from a small detail in error (it believes my London suburb is in Kent… it’s not, it’s London and it would more likely be Surrey anyway) it’s pretty interesting.

I’ve noted before that local targeting is challenging in the UK… local IP’s are much more difficult to pin down outside the UK, or at least they were. But Feedjit claim that they “…can determine the geographic locations at the city level of 90% of your website visitors.” That’s pretty impressive.

Now the interesting question is what we are going to DO with this information? I have some ideas… for another post.

Tags: cheeze, feedjit, geode, location