Comments on: Take My Privacy, Please!

Question: Take My Privacy, Please!

Apropos of Something — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 10:44:03 -0800

I'm trying to hack together an OS X script that's dependent upon my location. Problem is, Apple's location services doesn't know where my home router is - and I don't have an iOS device to tell it. Is there any way I can suggest or hint to the server where my IP is located?

By: empath

empath — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 10:59:21 -0800

Can you be more specific about what information you need exactly? Lat/Long?

By: Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 11:00:52 -0800

Yep, I just need lat/long. More specificity, the better (I'm playing around with the Dark Sky API, and I want to make sure it can change when my location changes).

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 11:02:23 -0800

Many location services use SkyHook. You can update your router location here. Not sure if that will filter down to Apple or not.

By: wongcorgi

wongcorgi — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 11:37:27 -0800

Just hardcode your home IP as 'home'. Or fallback to a IP geolocation service.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:03:56 -0800

Yeah I'd hard-code an exception for your home for now. It's odd that your IP isn't in Apple's database. Have you checked on Google and Bing? They have their own databases.

By: Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:19:52 -0800

Nelson: "Have you checked on Google and Bing? They have their own databases."

It would seem that Google's database knows where I am, which makes sense - I've got Android devices in the house. I have yet to find a way to access Google's lat/long from bash, but if anyone knows how, it'd be a super help...

By: Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:29:28 -0800

Note: I can tell there's a CoreLocation problem with my home router because the Dates and Times system pref panel in OS X can't find my time zone either.

By: wongcorgi

wongcorgi — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 14:56:38 -0800

There is a Google location API. It's fairly trivial to call via curl.

https://developers.google.com/latitude/v1/currentLocation

By: Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 19:05:22 -0800

wongcorgi: "There is a Google location API. It's fairly trivial to call via curl.

https://developers.google.com/latitude/v1/currentLocation"

That seems to require access to your Google login info for the Latitude current location stuff. If possible, I'd like to use the computer's current location for this operation.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 09:08:57 -0800

Yeah, I think you're right. Chrome has the "what is my current location" baked in to it and it's very easy to use from Javascript, but I'm sure you don't want to launch a whole Chrome instance to do it. I'm not sure the lookup API Chrome uses is exposed by Google elsewhere. The Google Geolocation API is closer to what you want, but it seems to only work with WiFi and cell tower data, not IP address. But the WiFi thing may work for you, worth a shot.

There's a lot of IP -> location services out there, really, the problem is finding a good free one. A google search for [ip address to location api] turns up some promising leads, I've just never used any of them. Maybe hostip.info?

The Geoloqi API may also be able to help you, it's a cool product, but now that ESRI has bought the company who knows what its future is.