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w3c / geofencing-api

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Advantage of optional inclusion of postion attribute in GeofenceEvent unclear #16

Open markvandertol opened 9 years ago

markvandertol commented 9 years ago

When adding a GeofenceRegion to the GeofenceManager it is possible to specify the option includePosition. It is unclear to me what advantage it would yield when a webapp adds a new geofence with the option set to false. There is no description why the Position attribute isn't added by default to the GeofenceEvent. The location is known when you breach, so there shouldn't be high costs involved to just add that attribute to the GeofenceEvent.

Is it a security/privacy consideration? The spec only mentions a permission related to geofencing at the moment, but should includePosition only be possible when the user also allows sharing of his location, since a Position has a higher accuracy than a geofence?

mkruisselbrink commented 8 years ago

This attribute was something @npdoty brought up (towards the end of the geofencing section of the meeting notes of last years TPAC. I think the idea was that if a website doesn't need the exact location it shouldn't be asking for it, and that user agents could take the includePosition attribute into account when deciding whether to grant permission for this specific geofence or not.

But having said that, I'm not sure how helpful this is going to be in practice.

npdoty commented 8 years ago

Right, the idea was to encourage site developers that don't need precise location information to not ask for it, following the basic principle of data minimization.

I'm not sure if user agents will feel comfortable making a distinction (or a user-visible distinction) between requests that ask for the precise info or not, unless they're also going to use the size of the geo-fence to try to give users some assurance that a fence won't be precise.