SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Nest plans to offer its smart thermostat to Irish consumers for free when they sign up for a two-year contract with Electric Ireland. Nest chief executive Tony Fadell said at the Web Summit in Dublin that the deal could put his company’s thermostats in up to 1.6 million homes, according to CNET, and claimed that similar deals would be announced for other countries in the future.
[...] Google is infamous for its ability to offer consumers products which are paid for not by their users but by the ads those users see. Its products are among the best in their categories, and when it’s free to use them, there’s little reason for consumers to pay for another service. Now Google is just applying that same logic to the real world — and it will probably work out for it just as well.
Even I’ve grown sick of hearing this sentiment, but it’s more relevant now than ever: If you aren’t the one paying for a service, you are the product.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @11:58AM
... and will save you quite a lot of money in heating and cooling costs, so you will quickly recoup your investment.
Just be sure to purchase one that works for the kind of heater and cooler you actually use - oil furnace, wall-mounted gas heater or what have you.
Just today I was deeply dismayed to visit a bank website, and firefox asked me for permission to pass my location onto the banks web server. I clicked the No button, then the bank's page presented a map that displayed all the branches close to where I was at the time. I puzzled over that at first then realized that the bank had geolocated my IP when firefox didn't provided my location.
Just now I realized I could defeat that by installing a proxy on my Xen server that's in a data center in Silicon Valley. I live in Vancouver, Washington so anyone who tries to geolocate me would be eight hundred miles off.
I didn't used to worry so much about disclosing my location online but the last time I did give permission, the website pinpointed me to within roughly thirty feet to where I actually was.
Look, I'm a generally law-abiding citizen. It's not like I'm trying to hide from anyone, but being geolocated on the web, or as that other article has the British MP wanting law enforcement and intelligence to be able to follow cell phones around, I just don't want to be followed.
Consider that stalking is a felony, even if you never, ever come close to your victim. If you don't believe me, try following someone _wherever_ they go. Even if you never set foot anywhere that the general public isn't completely welcome, keep that up for long and you'll be doing hard time in the pen. How is it any different when online advertisers and the government stalk me by geolocating my IP to thirty feet?
(Score: 1) by SecurityGuy on Thursday November 06 2014, @05:41PM
That's your browser, actually. I've written code to do this, and you simply request the browser hand over the location data. If the user grants it, you get a lat, long, altitude, and precision. IIRC, when I did it my test browser didn't report altitude, and there were a bunch of other optional parameters that weren't implemented such as heading and speed. Accuracy just depends on how good a GPS fix your device gets. On the bottom floor of a 2 story building, I'd often get 100+ meters. Outside with a clear view of the satellites, I'd often get less than 7 meters, which is on par with your roughly 30 feet.