IP address detection for geo-location or MAC address much secure?

Question

Recent study many websites are using geo-location technology on their Websites.

I'm planning to implement one website which can be detect the web visitor more accurate. An found that Mozilla is using some kind of detect MAC address technology in their Geo-Location web service. Is it violate some privacy issue?

I believe most of Geo-location service providers only offer country to city level. But the Mac address detection enable to locate the web visitors' location more correctly than using IP address detection.

If detect the MAC address is not practical, which geo-location service provider is offering more accurate data to detect my Website visitor around the world?

Answer 1

I think the MAC address is referring to the wifi node their connecting to and not their actual MAC address. I'm not sure which API you're using but I don't think that will help you as I believe its a client side tool.

I've used MaxMind in the past for my company's advertisement geotrageting but we've ever needed to drill down to a state level. Outside of the US, I'm not sure how specific it will get other than providing the country.

MaxMind provides a server-side solution. Otherwise, I think you're going to need to look up specific APIs for various browsers and I doubt all of them have such support yet (I'm talking about you IE).

Answer 2

In general, MAC addresses have nothing to do with location. Also, you cannot get the client MAC address. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2854731/why-cant-the-server-get-the-client-mac-address-like-the-client-ip.

Answer 3

I prefer to use the IP address because the MAC address (wireless geolcoation) is only detect the user when they are using laptop. You can read this article HTML 5 Geolocation API and IP Geolocation from IP2Location.com for more detail on MAC address detection at your web site.

This web site is also providing geolocation service. It is a good service for detecting my web visitor by IP address as the data is accurate compared to other free service provider.

Answer 4

It's true that Firefox uses the Google Location Service and a list of the available WiFi networks and their SSIDs to implement the W3C Geolocation API (what some have called "HTML5 Geolocation"). This does commonly provide much more precise information. Different web browsers implement the API using different underlying technologies: on the iPhone, for example, the browser might be using cell tower triangulation or even GPS.

There absolutely are privacy concerns in accessing the user's precise real-time location: for example, see this report we published at UC Berkeley.

If you do need precise location information, the W3C API provides functionality supported by many browsers using a variety of underlying technologies. To help protect your users' privacy you should be clear and up front about how you'll be using, storing or distributing their location information. But if you just need the country level, then IP geolocation is likely sufficient.