Automatically geolocate visitors

This is ok for RIA administration only. Anything beyond that point would be a flat out invasion of privacy, and just plain wrong.

I understand the motivation, and practical benefits, and I also understand that the ability to know where I am is already in the hands of the Bureau of Site Security at RIA Central. On a personal level, it doesn't much matter to me, although my laptop keeps bitching about its privacy being violated. Stupid Toshiba machine...

Magellan: Matt, what's the flashing red on the east coast? Automatt: Looks like oscar, sir. He's on the move, should I zoom in? Magellan: Yes, and crossreference with any of the sites in his cookie file to see if they are tracking too. Automatt: He comes up on Ticketmaster. He just bought three tickets to a Kenny G concert...

Big Brother RIA style. Use the ip address to find the culprit, link it with google maps and when said reviewer goes on vacation, send me their address. I could use a new laptop.

Sounds like a pretty decent idea, and I'm not sure if there would be a downside to it.

By utilizing this, Sukings was found to really be a Harvard professor named W. Throckmorton Finch who was merely "going slumming with the proles."

I think there's some confusion about this feature. The city information pulled from an IP (available today btw), would be used to deliver locally relevant features to the member. So if I were doing a search for a restaurant, the default result would be San Francisco restaurants. This information would never be made public, unless the member wanted it to be public. And the geolocation is sometimes accurate to the city level - never any more granular than that.

There’s a wee bit of something about this that vaguely smacks of Big Brother (actually I thought you guys already had this info). From another perspective - I can still recall a time a few years back when I inadvertently rattled the cage of some Jr. Psycho who threatened to track me down. I can see this being a nice little tool to deter the wrath of severe RIA misfits.

I do enough traveling that this would be annoying. I'd just assume have my location be the town I actually live in, without RIA continually changing my location.

In some ways I could see this feature as being useful, but I think it would depend on how that data was used and whether the user has the option to opt out. One possible use is for something I searched for earlier "Life on Mars"... it's a great UK TV show, however an American version has also recently been aired which makes it hard to know which one is which... if it had auto-picked it based on my location then that would have been awesome

In case anyone's curious, your ip address already tells us (and any other website) where you are. To alleviate concerns, we would never display this information publicly. If we wanted to use this information to optimize your site experience, it would probably improve navigation in the local directory and in search by catering it more around the general area where you live. It could also extend to other things where location is significant like preferring local sports teams by default, as an example.

I'd prefer psychos have little or no idea where I'm located.

This would probably make the local directory a lot more valuable to site visitors, and would enable us to put reviews of local businesses into your river.

I could track enemies who are inching closer. Great idea... Up Date: After reading CastleBee's review, I was reminded of a couple of people...one on this site, who I would definitely NOT want to know my exact location. Bad idea. Thanks, CB. 5------------1 Up Date 2: Okay...further explanation from RIA eases my mind. 1------------3