2010/11/3 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com:
Thanks Chad. I'm interested in some more informations about that, especially how does this relates to the Privacy policy.
Is the information stored anywhere?
All geoip does is look at your IP address and do a database lookup to translate it to your rough location. In the US this is usually fairly accurate (closest major city in most cases I've seen), in other parts of the world not so much, which is why the fundraising folks are only useing it for per-country targeting, because we're pretty sure geoip produces the correct country code for a given IP. To see what geoip makes of your location, simply visit http://geoip.wikimedia.org .
Becasue geoip determines your probable location based only on your IP address, there are no additional privacy implications. Anyone who knows your IP address can run it through a geoip database (I don't think geoip.wm.o allows querying arbitrary IPs, but there's plenty of other such services out there) and find out the rough location it corresponds to. That means any questions regarding privacy of location fall back to privacy of IP, and that's something we already have a well-established policy for.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)