Two hours of my life? Really?
Jun. 10th, 2011 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
green_dreamsThoughts on the IP-address-resolving-to-geolocation-(mostly) thing that seems to have blown up and (sadly, IMHO) been rolled back...
Yes, your city/town location (possibly not an accurate one) is being shared. Not by LJ. By your ISP. LJ just lets me insist that if you're going to show up in my journal then I get to know where you're posting from.
I get that it feels safer when the information isn't displayed so clearly--hell, it still feels a bit weird when I look at
and see my OS and browser. There's a funny little hiccup of "oh, wait, how did you know that?" I've seen my IP being displayed on my own posts and I knew when other people could see it, and that didn't quite sink in the way seeing my province and town being displayed sank in.
At the same time, I honestly don't see that displaying "Reston, Virginia" instead of "204.205.34.111" is much different than displaying "9:42 p.m (local) 10-06-2011" instead of "1:42 a.m. GMT 11-06-2011". I don't need this information[1]. I didn't pay attention to displaying the IP in a way I liked seeing better before; now I've noticed, and I'm definitely not the only person who did, and there is probably a widget to display it that way for me now, even if LJ doesn't put it back.
I get being uncomfortable about this, but it's basically "now people understand the information they were already given and gave out", and I don't think I would be comfortable complaining about that.
---
[1] Unless you are a stalker, spammer, or troll. You aren't, are you? Good.
Yes, your city/town location (possibly not an accurate one) is being shared. Not by LJ. By your ISP. LJ just lets me insist that if you're going to show up in my journal then I get to know where you're posting from.
I get that it feels safer when the information isn't displayed so clearly--hell, it still feels a bit weird when I look at
and see my OS and browser. There's a funny little hiccup of "oh, wait, how did you know that?" I've seen my IP being displayed on my own posts and I knew when other people could see it, and that didn't quite sink in the way seeing my province and town being displayed sank in.
At the same time, I honestly don't see that displaying "Reston, Virginia" instead of "204.205.34.111" is much different than displaying "9:42 p.m (local) 10-06-2011" instead of "1:42 a.m. GMT 11-06-2011". I don't need this information[1]. I didn't pay attention to displaying the IP in a way I liked seeing better before; now I've noticed, and I'm definitely not the only person who did, and there is probably a widget to display it that way for me now, even if LJ doesn't put it back.
I get being uncomfortable about this, but it's basically "now people understand the information they were already given and gave out", and I don't think I would be comfortable complaining about that.
---
[1] Unless you are a stalker, spammer, or troll. You aren't, are you? Good.
