Geolocation is the "identification of the real-world geographic location of an object", one example of this is Internet Protocol (IP) mapping where a device (mobile, computer…) is connected to the internet. So far, so good and so simple. But it is not! Geolocation is actually extremely controversial with regards to today's ever changing internet connected, legal, commercial, political and societal world. Hence it is complex and has spawned a multi-billion $ solutions industry delivering a range of products, software and service providers that affect as well as provide solutions for your website(s)…
Geolocation a technical introduction
Geolocation Application Programming Interface (API) provides the exact location of an emitting device: a mobile phone, computer, switch and all manner of networked equipment (think internet of things). It enables the device to be located based on geographical coordinates, measurements, longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, a country, city, town, village, building name, street address, house, apartment, internet service provider (ISP), domain/host name, web address and the list continues. All this through API’s, internet protocols (IP), media access control (MAC) address, radio frequency (RF) systems, Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) data, wireless positioning systems and again the list of methods continues. Welcome to complex technical world of geolocation.
Geolocation management
It is a whole multi-billion $ geolocation solutions industry. The important precursor is that the device itself has to have been configured to provide information. It will, of course, only deliver the information that it was set-up to provide, and this is a choice that is made as the device is (or is not, or is falsely) configured and re-configured. And hence we have geolocation management or manipulation, an example of which is geolocation-blocking, known as geo-blocking. Geo-blocking is the practice of denial of access to a website and/or redirecting to another website, traffic that is coming from pre-defined IP addresses, this can for example be target countries, or geographical regions, and is determined by identifying the inbound user’s IP address.
There are many reasons why organizations geo-block, for companies the most common being because a business or service operates legally in one location but cannot operate legally in another, hence they are protecting themselves from legal challenge (example GDPR, see below). Do know that there are many ways to get around geo-blocking. Virtual private networks (VPN) is one, that is in this context, a private internet network linked across the public networks facilitating data transfers between IP addresses. The bottom line is that today there are solutions so you do what you want re geo-location management.
Geolocation and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
And, in the beginning the word was the W3C, which “is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Led by Web inventor and Director Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe, W3C's mission is to lead the Web to its full potential”. Geolocation is a big subject, so W3C has a role to play, in providing guidelines and recommended best practice. It is worth quoting W3C “The Geolocation API defines a high-level interface to location information associated only with the device hosting the implementation, such as latitude and longitude. The API itself is agnostic of the underlying location information sources. Common sources of location information include Global Positioning System (GPS) and location inferred from network signals such as IP address, RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses, and GSM/CDMA cell IDs, as well as user input. No guarantee is given that the API returns the device's actual location:”. W3C identifies the main regulatory concerns of “security and privacy”. Unsurprisingly, the commercial and political world brings us back to reality, adding in its own plethora of geolocation requirements and imperatives for and by consumers, businesses and governments.
Geolocation and the European Union
Europe is a commercial and political block of a certain size and import (>500M wealthy citizens, and #1 single largest economy in the world…) and the European Union (EU) Commission has, a necessary view on website “geolocation”, “Geo-blocking and other geographically-based restrictions undermine online shopping and cross-border sales. Regulation 2018/302 of 28 February 2018 will set an end to unjustified geoblocking. The Regulation will start applying as of 3 December 2018.” The background to this is the Commission survey (2015) found that only 37% of websites actually allowed cross-border customers to reach the final step before completing the purchase by entering payment details. The commission concluded that the problem equally affects consumers and businesses as end users of products and services and exists both in the online environment and in real-world situations. For the EU the priority is always the protection of citizens rights and privacy, and this time online. The EU acts as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) demonstrated in May 2018, subsequently some companies, both in and outside the EU, are geo-blocking (the GDPR Shield) their services in the EU in order to avoid having to deal with the complex GDPR rules and their consequences. Read more on Get ready for GDPR with IBT Online.
Geolocation and China
Let’s take a hop to arguably the world’s #1 economy and certainly in terms of internet users, China. Another country another commercial and political viewpoint. China’s online population of 731M (soon to be >1B) gets a highly restricted internet (from our perspective), there is no Google, Facebook and YouTube and less well known others… President Xi Jinping has his vision for the future of China’s internet, “We should respect the right of individual countries to independently choose their own path of cyber-development”. Today, China boasts the Great Fire Wall, the Golden Shield as well as the Great Canon, delivering the most sophisticated online censorship operation in the world. Collectively, they geo-block and manage internet traffic as it originates, enters, travels within and leaves China, deleting, changing, manipulating and replacing data as it journeys the web to its final users, and much more. China has the most sophisticated geolocation “work around” internet industry, as millions of citizens navigate the internet both inside and outside China…Register and watch our webinar on How to sell online in China.
Geolocation and the United States
In the United States, several states have enacted laws establishing personal location privacy rights, but at the federal level does not provide protection of geolocation information. There is the proposed Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act which “seeks to establish a legal framework that gives government agencies, commercial entities, and private citizens clear guidelines for when and how geolocation information can be accessed and used. The objective being to create a process whereby government agencies can get a probable cause warrant to obtain geolocation information in the same way that they currently get warrants for wiretaps or other types of electronic surveillance and that would prohibit businesses from disclosing geographical tracking data about its customers to others without the customers' permission”. Don’t hold your breath, the big US enterprises in this space are not in favor, so this will be a long time coming, if ever.
References:
https://www.w3.org/TR/geolocation-API/
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/geo-blocking-digital-single-market