[guardian-dev] Experimental app to improve privacy in location sharing

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

As part of the T2 Panic effort, I've recently been diving deep into the issues
of sharing location.  It is unfortunately looking really bad, with many
services, including Google, frequently sharing location as plain text over the
network. I've started to write up some of the issues on our blog:

https://guardianproject.info/tag/panic

As part of this, I've put together an experimental Android app that aims to
act as a privacy filter for all ways of sharing location.  Mostly, that means
it accepts all sorts of URLs from location services, and tries to parse the
location from the URL, then rewrites it into a geo: URI (http://geouri.org),
which is the standard way to share location in Android (and hopefully soon all
others).  As of ChatSecure v14.1.0, these geo: URLs are also clickable.

Many URLs are not parsable, like http://goo.gl/maps/Cji0V.  LocationPrivacy
then goes online and to try to fetch the location.  This should happen over
Tor, but it does not yet. You have been warned!  Otherwise, it changes the URL
to HTTPS on services that support it.

You can get LocationPrivacy on FDroid in the Guardian Project repo:
https://f-droid.org
https://guardianproject.info/fdroid

Or from Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.guardianproject.locationprivacy

Source code:
https://github.com/guardianproject/LocationPrivacy

Report issues here:
https://dev.guardianproject.info/projects/panic/issues

Please do not rely on this app for strong privacy, it is still very much a
new, beta app.

.hc

-- 
PGP fingerprint: 5E61 C878 0F86 295C E17D  8677 9F0F E587 374B BE81
https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x9F0FE587374BBE81

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/guardian-dev/attachments/20150129/97c05b9d/attachment.sig>