The new version of Firefox 3.5 contains a program that can give away your location to a website. Don’t worry, you can disable this setting. The marketer in me gets excited about this technology. The privacy advocate in me shutters.
While I don’t mind my information being used in aggregate, IP addresses are not considered personal information. Therefore, a website can easily collect actual location, IP address, and any information you enter into forms. Now, on an eCommerce site, this doesn’t matter too much as you are already giving your credit card billing information. However, on a site where you normally just give something like an email address, a good marketer might use this service to automatically put your email into a specific location and send you targeted ads. Having access to data is one thing, being able to use it is quite another.
Firefox 3.5 is shipping with a new feature called Geode. This feature used Loki technology to determine the user’s location. The way Loki works is it maps Wi-Fi signals (therefore, if you are on dial-up or a wired connection, the feature will not work, and the geo-location presumably will fall back on standard Google location services (that’s a guess, I can’t find process documentation on that instance). In addition, it appears at present (but this is subject to change) that each site that uses location aware services (API Info) will have to ask permission before looking up your location. If you want to disable this feature permanently, How-To Geek has a nice write-up about the plug-in and disabling the feature in RC 3.5.
However, while Loki is the technology used, what actually happens is your data is sent to Google Location Services where Google will store:
- your computer’s IP address,
- information about the nearby wireless access points, and
- a random client identifier, which is assigned by Google, that expires every 2 weeks
That’s what’s listed is stored, but if you are logged into a Google account, they could also associate your entire Google account with a location every time a new site asks for your location.
Seeing Geode in Action
If you visit, http://3liz.org/geolocation/ the new Firefox will popup an info bat at the top of the browser:
Here you have the option of sharing location or not to share. If you do not choose ‘remember this for this site’, the next time you visit the site (or refresh the page) you will have to choose to share the location on that same site again.
The resulting page will attempt to guess your location:
(Click to see full view).
The exact same location is shown for me as I see with Google Latitude from my house. Now, I must live in a strange area as Google latitude (and Geode) seem to have large error margins (they often place me more than a mile from my actual location). However, when I venture more than a few miles from my house, the accuracy increases significantly. This seems strange to me as I live inside the Washington DC beltway, an urban area with so many cell towers and wireless signals that this service should be as accurate here as anywhere in the US. However, for whatever reasons, its not that accurate at all time.
I also tried this at the airport, and the service showed me at the airport in the correct terminal. So, there are times it’s eerily accurate.
What does this mean to marketers?
According to w3Schools, Firefox is up to 47% marketing share. w3Schools does not break out Firefox version 2 vs 3 in their stats. So it is difficult to see how quickly individuals upgrade to new versions of Firefox.
If Loki is really accurate to 10-20 meters (I’ve heard that’s for urban areas and it’s less accurate in rural areas, accuracy is subject to wi-fi data points), then its much more accurate than today’s geo-location features that often rely on host provider to IP mapping.
Unofficially, I hear the Yahoo elves whisper they are 90% accurate at a city level, and I hear the Google one’s whisper around 85% at that level. At the state level they are much more accurate, and everyone is exceptionally close to 100% at the country level.
Most campaigns find success with location targeting at the city level, but the success starts to diminish significantly when you move to smaller than a city level (such as a neighborhood, or radius targeting).
If consumers opt to allow the search engines to see their location (presumably because you could see some nicely tailor search results if your actual location was known, along with the engines already know a lot about you, so how much does location actually matter?), then marketers could once again start using very small targeting areas to reach consumers in very specific areas.
However, what I can’t find the answer to is if Google will always have your location data, or be able to use it, from other website’s you may have visited. If you visit a site where a unique identifier is used, and that identifier is set by Google (Because Firefox is using Google location services), can Google just use the information without even asking?
The Consumer’s Path?
Personally, I’ll try out some location services and see how much it creeps me out compared to gives me better results. I’m not sure which way I’ll fall yet. The marketer in me says:
- the better the results (including ads) the consumers see
- the more they like ads and click on them
- the better the targeting becomes in reaching a consumer
- and consumer’s don’t become blind to ads
- and it saves the consumer time
Consumers like relevant ads. If an ad is relevant to the consumer, consumers will click and buy. Relevant ads save the consumers time in trying to find the correct service or product. Relevant ads are a win-win for both consumers and marketers.
However, many countries place a high value on privacy. When a benefit it high enough, consumers will give up private information
- an email address for a free download
- personal information for a credit card application to receive 10% off a purchase
- letting a grocery store know every single thing you buy so that you get a small percentage off of some items
What is the tradeoff for location based information? Only time will tell how the new location services will affect marketing; however, I do know they will have an effect, I just don’t know how positive or negative it will be.
If nothing else, after a few years, no one will care and will consider it part of daily life. Remember when GMail launched and everyone was worried about Google reading their email? Google did not change anything. They still how ads based upon an email’s content. However, GMail is one of the fastest growing email clients today. After a few years, it becomes part of live and the privacy concerns fade away.
It is accepted wisdom within the search marketing community that newspapers should be in Google News and be happy for the downstream traffic. It’s common to see an article about how the newspapers want a rev share with Google, or complain about Google news, and then have the search marketing community rip apart the newspapers as dinosaurs.
Yahoo has an 
