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by kazinator 1519 days ago
What are your daily driver tech stacks? Desktop OS, apps, Phone, ...

How are you able to entirely avoid anything that ever asks for your location (and not just deny the request and keep using)?

You do know that any site can infer your location within a reasonably accurate ballpark (e.g. metropolitan area or district) from just your IP address, without asking.
1 comments
Nextgrid 1519 days ago
> You do know that any site can infer your location within a reasonably accurate ballpark (e.g. metropolitan area or district) from just your IP address, without asking.

Which is more than enough for a search engine and given that it'll be accurate in 80% of cases, no need to bombard the user with intrusive permission prompts right from the start.

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kazinator 1519 days ago
Yes that is a better user experience. Suppose we want to design a site which is as nice as possible to the users who dislike the whole location business. So we make it opt-in. We can (A) use the location stuff in the browser or (B) just go by IP address.

Under both A and B we have our own opt-in preference. Under A, when the user enables the op-in preference, they are additionally bugged by the browser to allow that. Under B, they are not bugged by the browser: we just go ahead and start making use of their IP address.

By the way, I do not see anywhere in the Firefox settings a place where you can set what your location is. If users could specify their location, then that would be a good reason to prefer that mechanism over IP-based geolocation where the only way to change your apparent location is to use a VPN.

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