2010
Privacy Issues of the W3C Geolocation API
Nick Doty, Deirdre K. Mulligan and Eric Wilde. (2010). Privacy Issues of the W3C Geolocation API. UC Berkeley: School of Information. Report 2010-038. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rp834wf
Abstract
The W3C's Geolocation API may rapidly standardize the transmission of location information
on the Web, but, in dealing with such sensitive information, it also raises serious privacy
concerns. We analyze the manner and extent to which the current W3C Geolocation API provides
mechanisms to support privacy. We propose a privacy framework for the consideration of location
information and use it to evaluate the W3C Geolocation API, both the specification and its use in
the wild, and recommend some modifications to the API as a result of our analysis.