On 04.09.2014, at 01:52 , Bill Maggs <[email protected]> wrote: > Here's a proposal from for an alternative approach to iBeacon-like services > for the Web from a former Mozilla developer, now in the lab group for > retailer Target. Interested in what you all think about it. He's talking to > Mozilla and Google about it. > > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263926
The proposal itself is at https://github.com/csuwildcat/geo-origins/blob/master/explainer.md I’m a bit skeptical about the concept of tying websites to locations / geofences. The target store example given seems to assume that there is a 1:1 mapping between a location and a single good website. As a different example I’d imagine a shopping mall. The company running the shopping mall wants to advertise special opening hours or their shopping mall map and claim a geofence around the entire mall. Inside the mall there's a larger shop that wants to advertise a special sales promotion and claim a geofence around their shop. Inside this shop is an area dedicated to a specific brand which wants to advertise some brand specific content from their own website. And of course this store is on the second floor and there’s stores on floor one and three overlapping the geofence from the first store. In this scenario there’s a location with many different legitimate geofences for the same area and content from many different legitimate websites. But if that is allowed, than evil.com can also place their hidden beacon into the same location, and create an entity file on evil.com claiming this as their location too. As a different scenario evil.com might also put beacons into the world and claim on evil.com that the entire world or some large area belongs to it. If you encounter one of the evil beacons first, and only one website is allowed as the legitimate owner of an area, it would be able to block out any other beacons. In addition the geofence scenario also means you actually need to have working indoor positioning to check the geofence bounds, which might not be available or in many cases might not be particularly accurate. That’s not to mention that an international brand for example nike.com might have a very hard time tracking all the different places where they want to place beacons or where store owners place their beacons on their behalf. Not to mention a single entity file for an international brand website might have thousands or millions of entries in it, which makes it impractical to download and check against. Just my initial thoughts, Hanno _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
