{"id":1531,"date":"2009-06-03T00:27:41","date_gmt":"2009-06-03T05:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/?p=1531"},"modified":"2009-06-03T00:27:41","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T05:27:41","slug":"twitters-location-field-and-your-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/archives\/2009\/06\/03\/twitters-location-field-and-your-privacy","title":{"rendered":"Twitter&#8217;s Location field and your privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Twitter has a wonderful <b>Location:<\/b> field, and a lot of clients, like TwitterFon (for the iPhone), or twibble (for Symbian devices), tend to update the field automatically. They tend to update it with the phone&#8217;s built-in AGPS, so at worst, your accuracy in location, is about 100m or so. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/byte\/3590794045\/\" title=\"Location on Twitter by byte, on Flickr\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3396\/3590794045_c2a97bc34c_o.jpg?resize=138%2C30\" width=\"138\" height=\"30\" alt=\"Location on Twitter\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I find this to be a tiny problem. You can copy the location string (GPS coordinates), paste it into <a href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com\/\">Google Maps<\/a> and find out that the person at the Location above, is at <a href=\"http:\/\/maps.google.com.my\/maps?f=q&#038;source=s_q&#038;hl=en&#038;geocode=&#038;q=3.117599,101.676392&#038;sll=3.1394,101.6601&#038;sspn=0.008549,0.011823&#038;ie=UTF8&#038;z=17&#038;iwloc=A\">MidValley Megamall<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Who cares when you&#8217;re in a public location? That can be a good thing for bumping into friends. But what about stalkers who now know where you live? Or an angry wife, that knows you weren&#8217;t working late, but chilling out with the guys at a nearby pub?<\/p>\n<p>This is where <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/latitude\/intro.html\">Google Latitude<\/a> kind of makes sense. Its opt-in. You only share the location with your friends. Twitter is just open (very rarely, do people&#8217;s profiles remain private).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I thought it would be cool to write a quick Greasemonkey script to send me to Google Maps automagically. After all, <a href=\"http:\/\/diveintogreasemonkey.org\/\">Dive Into Greasemonkey<\/a> still applies&#8230; Quick search on userscripts.org, and I found <a href=\"http:\/\/userscripts.org\/scripts\/show\/42997\">Twitter Google Maps Link<\/a>. It does exactly what I want, so I didn&#8217;t need to hack up some JavaScript. Win :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twitter has a wonderful Location: field, and a lot of clients, like TwitterFon (for the iPhone), or twibble (for Symbian devices), tend to update the field automatically. They tend to update it with the phone&#8217;s built-in AGPS, so at worst, your accuracy in location, is about 100m or so. I find this to be a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[965,407,599,966,967,584,366,392],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-agps","tag-google-maps","tag-gps","tag-greasemonkey","tag-javascript","tag-location","tag-privacy","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4vJD-oH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1531"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1532,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions\/1532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bytebot.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}