Mobile web users shocked websites can watch their every move

March 24th 2014 - Sydney, Australia.
Mobile users can use a new web based demo to clearly see a live view of how 
their device is tracking their location right now. "Most people are aware their 
smart devices can track them, but they have no idea how accurate this is or 
even how they could start to visualise this" said Rob Manson, CEO & Co-founder 
of buildAR.com, the company that developed this demo. 
To test this for yourself all you need to do is open https://buildAR.com/trackme 
on your mobile device. It shows you an interactive map which displays exactly 
where your device thinks you are right now, and how accurate this is likely to be. 
"This opens people's eyes to the privacy implications of the modern web" 
said Manson. "But when you test it for yourself you also see how inaccurate this 
can be and it makes you think about how applications rely on this location data". 
The buildAR team have put together a blog post that walks through how this can 
impact different types of applications, including Augmented Reality apps that use 
this location data to show you information overlaid on the world around you. 
"Many AR apps quickly grab the first location estimate the phone provides so they 
can load the right data as quickly as possible" said Manson. "Although this often 
means the wrong data can be loaded. As soon as this information is displayed it 
then moves around as the phone makes more and more accurate calculations. This can 
create a very confusing user experience". 
The https://buildAR.com/trackme demo is part of the awareness building that buildAR 
is working on through their "Augmenting the Web" Kickstarter project. This project 
makes it possible to deliver Augmented Reality using standard Web browsers, making 
AR available to Billions of Web users on all kinds of Smart & Wearable devices 
including smartphones, tablets, Google Glass and the Oculus Rift. You can check out 
the "Augmenting the Web" project at http://kck.st/1gnUJex 
Location data has already had a massive impact on all our lives and has become 
something we depend on every day, yet it is still an area that needs a lot more 
research, especially from a user focused perspective. "By helping people see what's 
really going on under the hood we're hoping we can all learn a lot more about how 
to create great web based experiences that rely on locations" said Alex Young, 
Chief Experience Officer & Co-founder of buildAR.  
About buildAR.com
Think of buildAR.com as “Wordpress for the Real World”. It makes creating Augmented 
Reality as "easy as adding a blog post" or "sending a tweet". The buildAR platform 
enables you to embed your digital content into the physical world around you by 
linking it to images, locations and more.

buildAR.com was launched in 2009 as the world's first Cloud based AR Authoring 
Platform, and has been leading the way ever since.

In 2010 buildAR presented the first overview of how they believed AR could work 
on the Web at the 1st International AR Standards Workshop in Seoul, Korea. 
Since 2010 the have co-founded ARStandards.org, traveled to a lot of workshops, 
hackfests and conferences and actively participated in shaping these new Web 
standards. The buildAR team have spent a lot of time talking to both Web and Web 
browser developers and have been working hard to contribute to the AR and Web 
standards communities. This work has been recognised and buildAR are now Invited 
Experts with the W3C, ISO and the Khronos Group. 
They even wrote a book on one of the key Web standards that is enabling the 
Augmented Web called "Getting started with WebRTC" (the Web Standard that enables 
access to Video Cameras and Microphones) and this is now a 5 star hit on Amazon.