alt Hacker NewsJitsi is about audio / video where this would make more sense, not about geolocation.
Geolocation based on IP address is always done in the background, so they already know what city you are from. But Google wants to have the nice high-precision location from our GPS chips so they can permanently associate the IP address, and available WIFIs/Bluetooth/network devices and all related MAC addresses to a specific building.
And they want to have this specific functionality so they can organically trick non-power-users who got accustomed to the permission popup dialogs into re-sharing their location.
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The audio/video version is in the works [1]. I imagine geolocation just got to this stage first because it's far simpler.
And IP-based geolocation is really unreliable beyond the country level. It depends on ISPs using a different pool of IP addresses for each city. That seems to be the norm in the US, but is not how every ISP runs their operation
1: https://developer.chrome.com/origintrials/#/view_trial/37362...
> Jitsi is about audio / video where this would make more sense, not about geolocation.
It's still permission-based. And the article mentions that the same ux is being done for media objects.
> Geolocation based on IP address is always done in the background, so they already know what city you are from
They don't. Maybe the trackers do, but most websites place me 100km to the west. When I want to look up opening times for supermarkets near me, I like the "show nearby" button.
Even Google gets confused because I VPN back to my home network. Every time I spend a few days somewhere else, Google's IP-based geolocation is broken again.