How quickly can somebody convert an IP address of a target into a real-word street address? Law enforcement regularly has need to determine a suspect’s exact location when investigating crimes on the Internet. They first use geolocation software and databases to determine the suspect’s rough location. Recent research has been able to scope a targeted IP address to within a 690m (0.43 mile) radi...

Google Chrome has implemented a number of “HTML5” APIs, including the Geolocation API and various storage APIs. In this paper we discuss some of our experiences on the Google Chrome team in implementing these APIs, as well as our thoughts around privacy for new APIs we are considering implementing. Specifically, we discuss our ideas of how providing access to things such as speech, web cameras,...

This paper discusses, conceptually and empirically, the proliferation of geolocation and face recognition systems embodied in modern smartphones and social media networks, which presents a growing concern for a user’s rights to privacy. This increase in data sharing brings about the very real threat of misuse, as most users are not aware that their geolocation data can easily be assembled into ...

Twitter is often used in quantitative studies that identify geographically-preferred topics, writing styles, and entities. These studies rely on either GPS coordinates attached to individual messages, or on the user-supplied location field in each profile. In this paper, we compare these data acquisition techniques and quantify the biases that they introduce; we also measure their effects on li...

Time of arrival (TOA) based geolocation schemes for indoor multi-hop environment are investigated and compared to some of conventional geolocation schemes such as least squares (LS) or residual weighting (RWGH). The multi-hop ranging involves positive multi-hop noise as well as non-line of sight (NLOS) and Gaussian measurement noise, so that it is more prone to ranging error than one-hop range....

In this paper, we address the problem of landmark image annotation, defined as the task of automatically annotating a landmark query image with relevant descriptors (keywords or tags). Given a new query image along with its geolocation metadata (latitude and longitude), we retrieve several other images already available in a community image database (e.g., flickr.com, panoramio.com), found with...

The growing diffusion of pervasive collaboration environments and technical advancement of sensing technologies have fostered the development of a new wave of online services whose functionalities are based on users’ physical position. Thanks to the widespread diffusion of mobile devices (e.g. cell phones), many services can be greatly enriched with data reporting where people are, how they are...

Location-based services (LBS) denote services provided to mobile users according to their geographic location. Such services are emerging as value-added services, and their implementation requires a secure and reliable wireless architecture. This paper identifies technical challenges related to LBS technologies, and presents a cost-effective wireless network architecture which can efficiently s...

The future of computing includes "adaptive" menu structures for applications that will automatically select content and navigation options – as desired – based upon the location of the user. With wireless systems, location awareness improves networking efficiency and helps alleviate the notoriously slow process of inputting information into handheld computers. For example, a security guard coul...

The present paper details a technique for adjusting in a smart manner the position estimates of any user equipment given by different geolocation/positioning methods in a wireless radiofrequency communication network based on different strategies (observed time difference of arrival , angle of arrivals, propagation delay ). The main advantage of our proposal is to improve in a remarkable way th...