Posted by enz 1 day ago
> If a prompt appears unexpectedly, users may block it reflexively or accidentally, unaware that this decision creates a permanent block that is difficult to reverse. This context gap—rather than the feature itself—is a primary driver of high denial rates.
> If a user previously blocked location access when browsing a site (perhaps by accident or lack of context), clicking the element triggers a specialized recovery flow. This helps them re-enable location at the moment when they actually want to use location, without the friction of navigating deep into the browser's site settings.
Google sees "high denial rates" when they try ask users for their geolocation. This is a problem for Google's customers, the advertisers. So they introduce this <geolocation> HTML tag so that dark patterns can be employed to trick users into permanently sharing location even though they have blocked location sharing before.
If the Google engineers who are working on this feature would actually give a damn about users who decided to block geolocation access, this feature would be designed as a "temporary access to geolocation for duration of browser session".
So basically it is all about more tracking and less data privacy.
It's overdue that skilled engineers provide better solutions than this crap, but of course it's much easier to be apolitical and become a millionaire working for a bunch of tech bros who visited Epstein's island.
Also I’m not sure about the argument of context disconnect. Properly designed websites will only ask for (and prompt the location permission modal) when it really needs it.
> Zoom reported a 46.9% decrease in camera or microphone capture errors
But I have no doubt there is a play happening here.
Probably it will change over time to make gathering data easier?
Or something else that makes Google money.
Not to mention Google's history of pushing some non-standard behavior into Chrome single handedly to make it the de facto behavior, ignoring voices questioning the motivation, timeline and technical implementation. They are discussed here on HN and everywhere else and easy to find.
Coming back to this, my response is the same: the status quo works, why change it? Similar to how Mozilla responds to replacing user agent with "Hints API" nonsense. I don't want another way to get my location, because I already block all location requests. Google wants site owners to get location more easily out of unsuspecting users. I can't see how this is good for anyone but Google and its friends.
As you assume that GP has not read the post, how about you?
Because google clearly state that the "high denial rates" are a problem, but their framing of the issue is that the users have a "context gap" which needs to be fixed. Because they are convinced that even though users have decided against geolocation sharing with a specific website they want to get prompted about it over and over again as part of the organic interface of the website. And if they un-block it once over the new interface then the previous block will be forgotten and the permission will forever be granted.
A solution respecting their users would be to allow geolocation for duration of the browser tab, but that is clearly not in line with their data collection goals for their advertisers.
Thinking that everything Google produces might not be positive is NOT jumping into conspiracy theories.
- scribble on a napkin (explainer)
- ask others for their position
- ship regardless of position or any outstanding issues
- claim it's a new standard
As noted in the intent to ship for both, these are a very specific narrow cases chipped off a bunch broader attempt to offer declarative ways to handle permissions in general, a <permission> element.
Intent-to-ship for geolocation: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/GL0Bk...
Earlier Page-Embedded Permissions Control (PEPC) proposal: https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/113 https://github.com/andypaicu/PEPC/blob/main/explainer.md
The root problem is that permissions right now are super hard to adjust for users (and the way they are exposed to the page is not very good at dealing with users turning permissions on and off either). It's imo very good that we are finally leaving this awful tarpit of design, & moving towards permissions being more fluid. I get that other browsers wanted to be conservative & not do a generic <permission> element, but given how big an improvement this feels like, I sort of wish it'd gotten the pass.
Unlike you I'm not getting paid enough by google to accept this narrative. The root problem for google is "high denial rates" of geolocation prompts, as clearly stated by Google in the post.
Now please tell me what information the geolocation prompt actually provides to the website that cannot be taken from the IP address, which is already tracked and processed by google and every single website tracking tool. IP address tells the website about the city where users come from.
The root problem with "high denial rates" is that Google wants to know if you live in the rich part of town or in the poor part of town. This is why google engineers try to find new ways for users to permanently undo their blocking of geolocation permission.
If google engineers had any concern about their users, then the default option would be a way to temporarily allow geolocation for duration of the browser session, e.g. when you need to really use google maps. And after the browser window closes it would later go back to the previously blocked state from before.
It's a cognitive dissonance.
Show me the bus schedule for the nearest bus stop, show me the nearest store, share my location in a chat..
The browser's IP-based geolocation (as per what https://mylocation.org/ can find out from my session) is kilometers away.
Like the Meta/Yandex apps were doing, just not strictly for position tracking, but more centered toward pinpointing your unique id.