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Show HN: Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are

tracingyou.bengrosser.com

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Re: Show HN: Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are

#2

Post by gruez »

So how does this work? I'm guessing it uses some sort of geoip database, but those are usually specific to an ISP, so you'll end up visitors from the same local ISP show up on the same location. I'm guessing they add a random (deterministic) bit of noise to each IP to mix things up a bit.

Re: Show HN: Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are

#3

Post by keithpeter »

gruez wrote: post #2

So how does this work? I'm guessing it uses some sort of geoip database, but those are usually specific to an ISP, so you'll end up visitors from the same local ISP show up on the same location. I'm guessing they add a random (deterministic) bit of noise to each IP to mix things up a bit.

I got Amsterdam (presumably the RIPE routing) and a quick flash of Birmingham UK but the city centre rather than the bit I live in a few miles out. Then lots of US locations so presumably the images are changing as other users access the page.

Re: Show HN: Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are

#5

Post by myztic »

Sites like that (without flashy Street View pictures bound to be wrong anyways) have been around for a very long time, many are provided by VPN providers to let their customers check how good they are hidden. It simply showed Amsterdam for me, which is my current VPN-Server, so no surprises there. What I mostly use to check such things https://ipleak.net/

What he does is only getting the location information and simply cross-referencing it with Google Street View / Google Maps Data. That being said: It's an art installation http://bengrosser.com/projects/tracing-you/ to provoke questions about privacy in a more closely connected world than ever. Noble idea.

"First it looks up the IP address using ipinfo to obtain geolocation. This is represented as a latitude/longitude pair (e.g. 48.8631831,2.3629368) that identifies a precise location on the earth. The latitude/longitude is sent to Google, where it queries the Street View, Static Maps, and Javascript Maps data services."

Not too impressive though.

Re: Show HN: Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are

#7

Post by Outdoorsman »

keithpeter wrote: post #3
gruez wrote: post #2

So how does this work? I'm guessing it uses some sort of geoip database, but those are usually specific to an ISP, so you'll end up visitors from the same local ISP show up on the same location. I'm guessing they add a random (deterministic) bit of noise to each IP to mix things up a bit.

I got Amsterdam (presumably the RIPE routing) and a quick flash of Birmingham UK but the city centre rather than the bit I live in a few miles out. Then lots of US locations so presumably the images are changing as other users access the page.

When the page loaded for me my IP and a street view 13 miles away from me loaded in the upper left hand panel...

Read later that it updates with each visitor...

Re: Show HN: Tracing You, a website that tries to “see” where its visitors are

#8

Post by hamhamed »

These aren't webcams (as some of the comments mention that)

My best guess would be using a geoIP to detect the user's city and then using Google Map's street view from that city and showcase it for a couple of seconds. The webmaster would have more accurate data if he had asked for HTML5 geo location permission.

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