Microsoft Makes Change to Geographic Location Positioning Service

Updated 9:14 A.M. 8/2/2011

Microsoft released a change to its geographic locationpositioning service on July 30, 2011, which addresses an issue highlighted in Elie Bursztein's blog on July 29, 2011. This change adds improved filtering to validate each request so that the service will no longer return an inferred position when a single Media Access Control address is submitted. Microsoft is keenly aware of the sensitivity around all privacy issues, especially those surrounding geolocation.       

Microsoft's privacy and security team has been in contact with Elie and we will continue the ongoing dialog with experts in the privacy field to improve our service offerings. We thank Elie, Matthieu Martin from Stanford University, Jean Michael Picod and Ivan Fontarensky from Cassidian for working with us on this issue.
 

Microsoft’s commitment to privacy means that not only will we seek to build privacy into products, but we’ll also engage with key stakeholders in government, industry, academia and public interest groups to develop more effective privacy and data protection measures. We will continue to update our service with improvements that benefit the consumer in both positioning accuracy as well as individual privacy.

Reid Kuhn is a Partner Group Program Manager on the Windows Phone engineering team at Microsoft