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• Launchpad Entry: desktop-lucid-gnome-geoclue

• Created: 2009-11-25

• Contributors:

• Packages affected: geoclue, empathy, ubiquity, gnome-panel, etc

Summary

Geolocation informations will be used to improve the user experience and make easier locations configuration.

Release Note

TODO

User stories

• Daniel travels for an Ubuntu event, when he opens his laptop he got automatically asked if the current clock location should be changed to match the timezone he's staying in now
• Martin does a new Ubuntu lucid installation, ubiquity does a good job at selecting the timezone by using the gps informations
• Michael likes to see where his friends are, he can do that in empathy now for those who have decided to publish those informations

Design

• The geoclue framework gets location informations using gps if there is a such device available otherwise fallback to reverse ip or wifi database, those informations can be used by desktop applications to handle user location in a better way
• There should be 2 set of informations, local ones to be used by softwares and the ones to publish to other users
• Lucid would only use informations for local software use, empathy who does publishing has a tab of options so this issue doesn't need to be adressed this cycle

Implementation

See blueprint work items.

UI Changes

• empathy will have an extra tab with options to enable publishing of geolocation informations (upstream has it)
• empathy will have a map widget displaying the location of other buddies (upstream has it)
• the clock applet should get a new dialog asking whether the user wants to change the current location

Test/Demo Plan

TODO when spec is beta.

BoF agenda and discussion

Notes about publishing those informations, that's not a topic for lucid though since only empathy will do it and already has a dialog to change those options:

• need to allow users to decide whether to use geoclue or not (i.e. not publish and/or spoof) (privacy / security issues: the psycho ex-spouse scenario)
• take the prefs tab from empathy, move it to "about me"
• *publishing* is where the security/privacy information is, applications that just use it without publishing it shouldn't need authorization.
• Applications that publish need to ask the user for permission.
• Design team to create guidelines for ways to ask for user's permission
• Need method for spoofing location. (Via gnome-about-me?). geoclue-geonames and geoclue-manual appear to help here.

CategorySpec