Privacy issues in location-aware browsing

Advances in positioning services and their pervasiveness, e.g., wi- based location services, pave the way to the development of innovative LBSs and architectures. In this paper we focus on location-aware browsing, a framework which enables websites to acquire the position of website users. In particular we discuss privacy issues related to the recent W3C proposal for a geolocation API standard. Such specication prescribes that users must give explicit consent to the disclosure of position information to websites. In this paper we argue that stronger and more exible protection is needed: a) users should be provided with the capability of disclosing coarse regions in place of point coordinates in order to limit the disclosure of personal location data; b) location information should be protected not only against websites but also against location service providers. We dis- cuss a possible approach to address those requirements under the assumption that the position is computed by a wibased positioning service. Finally, we broaden the discussion to include a complementary legal viewpoint.