CircleID

I once write a column related to this: Major League Baseball Knows Where You Live!

It was the Simpsons who first broke the story: Major League Baseball was spying on Bart's thoughts with a special satellite that he shot down, only to have Mark McGwire come and hush the whole thing up. But subscribers to Major League Baseball's MLB.TV service may be surprised to hear what the big leagues are learning about them, or at least trying to learn: their physical location.

I think the technologies are different from what the author here discusses.

Addressing the question "does it now make sense to put content sites to the burden of complying with the laws applicable to the people/machines they know are visiting them?"
No, even if you could identify with 100% accuracy the geographical location you would still have to know all the relevant laws of every country/state/province in the world to be able to comply with those laws.
Just identifying all those relevant laws and keeping your rules regarding these up to date would be a mammoth task in my opinion.

Ooh, I feel a headache coming on just thinking about the burden this would place on web masters and web hosting providers.

Susan

We use geolocation for two things:

1 - Email filtering (see http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives... )

2 - Fraud prevention

I've come across a number of sites that use geolocation to serve up targetted content, but I've also come across sites that are relying on the UserAgent strings instead, which leads to some really silly results (see http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives... )

Regards

Michele