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Websites seem to accesing information about my location

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  • Last reply by philipp

ayse.turak
ayse.turak
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Some websites seem to be accessing my location, at least, at the city level. For example, if I visit the website "https://www.theguardian.com/uk", even if I am at another country, I will see the weather report for the city I am at that moment. That website has never asked permission for my location. And indeed, it does not appear in the list of such websites in the settings. Firstly, how do I prevent this from happening? Secondly, and more importantly, this makes me wonder which websites may be accessing my location and to what precision.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

Some websites seem to be accessing my location, at least, at the city level. For example, if I visit the website "https://www.theguardian.com/uk", even if I am at another country, I will see the weather report for the city I am at that moment. That website has never asked permission for my location. And indeed, it does not appear in the list of such websites in the settings. Firstly, how do I prevent this from happening? Secondly, and more importantly, this makes me wonder which websites may be accessing my location and to what precision. Thanks in advance for any comments.

Chosen solution

hi, websites can estimate your location based on your ip address that's necessarily submitted with each network request in order to route a reply to the correct recipient.

the only way to work around that is to spoof your ip address with the help of a proxy or vpn-service - which can have other privacy implications though, since you need to trust any such providers as they'd be able to monitor your network traffic you're routing through them.

there are major databases which map ip addresses to a physical location - one provider is publicising it's accuracy data here for example: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city-accuracy-comparison

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philipp
philipp
  • Moderator
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Chosen Solution

hi, websites can estimate your location based on your ip address that's necessarily submitted with each network request in order to route a reply to the correct recipient.

the only way to work around that is to spoof your ip address with the help of a proxy or vpn-service - which can have other privacy implications though, since you need to trust any such providers as they'd be able to monitor your network traffic you're routing through them.

there are major databases which map ip addresses to a physical location - one provider is publicising it's accuracy data here for example: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city-accuracy-comparison