"This website wants to: Know your location. Allow or Block?"

This is becoming a common question these days as your surf the Internet, but why would a business want to know your location?

Given all the problems with privacy on social networks and hackers running amok, it's easy to assume the worst, but the truth is there are plenty of good reasons that a business might be interested in your location when you visit their website.

The most likely reason to request location data is to improve the CX (customer experience) while on the website. This can streamline activities such as locating a company's nearest store location and providing directions from the customer's current location to the store.

Another reason might be to present relevant offers based on the customer's location, sales, etc.

Full disclosure - I work for Bondware Inc., the parent company of the MurfreesboroVoice. We recently decided to incorporate location-based services onto this site to improve the customer experience by providing location context about the topic of a given story.

A given article can reference multiple locations that are then shown as pins on a map at the end of the article. A good example is our recent story about the new AMC movie theatre opening at Stones River Mall.

The map displays all the movie theatre locations in Murfreesboro to provide context. A mobile user can then click on one of the pins to obtain turn-by-turn directions to a theatre of choice.

Like other businesses, we hope visitors to our news website will appreciate this new experience enabled by location services.