((FREE)) Download Location Guard
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Firefox and Chrome browsers come equipped with geolocation services that can accurately pinpoint your location. Although this feature has its benefits, there are instances when you may want to hide or spoof your browser location. Whether you wish to access region-locked content or safeguard your privacy, several methods are available.
We explore in detail the various options to achieve your desired location change, ensuring you have all the necessary information to make informed decisions. Our team has conducted extensive research and testing to present you with reliable and effective techniques.
Spoofing your location using HTML5 can help access region-specific content, bypassing restrictions on certain websites and protecting your privacy. This section will discuss how to spoof your location in Chrome and Firefox using developer tools.
Following these methods, you can successfully spoof your location using HTML5 in Chrome and Firefox browsers. Remember that some websites may still be able to detect your location through other means, such as your IP address. In such cases, consider using a VPN for additional privacy protection.
Using a VPN will enable you to easily change your IP address, replacing your existing one with another from a location of your choice. However, this may not bypass other geolocation services used by the browser. To overcome this issue, you can manually change your location in your browser or use an extension such as Location Guard.
All of the best VPNs for changing location on Chrome and Firefox provide desktop and mobile apps. Most also offer Chrome and Firefox browser extensions as well (although browser extensions only secure browser traffic):
Note that for the location override to work in Chrome, you have to keep the developer tools open and stay in the same browser window. If you open a new window, it will revert back to your original location. This is different to Firefox where you can open multiple windows and still have your location spoofed.
Most major VPN providers offer browser extensions through which you can connect to a server and change your IP address and location. VPN browser extensions are most commonly available for Chrome and Firefox although they can also be found for Edge and Safari. The key difference is that if you use a browser extension, only your browser traffic (not apps) will be encrypted.
Although a VPN is designed to hide your real location, there are instances where it might be exposed, such as when your VPN connection drops or due to a DNS leak. However, reputable VPN providers implement advanced security features like kill switches and DNS leak protection to prevent your actual location from being exposed, ensuring your privacy and security at all times.
Some websites will employ additional measures to detect your location. In the case of Google, you also need to turn off the location tracking features within the account. You can read more about this here: -privacy/stop-google-apple-microsoft-tracking-location/
Websites can ask the browser for your location (via JavaScript). When they do so, the browserfirst asks your permission, and if you accept, it detects your location (typically by transmitting alist of available wifi access points to a geolocation provider such as Google Location Services, orvia GPS if available) and gives it to the website.
Location Guard is a browser extension that intercepts this procedure. The permission dialogappears as usual, and you can still choose to deny. If you give permission, then Location Guardobtains your location and adds "random noise" to it, creating a fake location. Only the fakelocation is then given to the website.
To see Location Guard in action use our demo page,this online demo,a geolocalized weather forecast,or go to OpenStreetMap / Google Mapsand press the button.When the website asks for your location you will see the icon,which also provides configuration options.
Location Guard provides privacy within a certain protection area by ensuring that alllocations within this area look plausible for being the real one. This is achieved by addingrandom noise in a way such that all locations within the protection area can produce the same fakelocation with similar probability. As a consequence, the fake location provides no information tothe website for distinguishing between locations within the protection area.
Warning: background knowledge can still be used by websites to guess the reallocation within the protection area. For instance, if the protection area is in the middle of a lakecontaining only a small island, it will be easy to infer that the real location is on the island. Inscenarios like this you should choose a higher privacy level or deny disclosing your location atall.What are "privacy levels"?The privacy level determines the amount of noise added to your real location. A higher level addsmore noise, so the fake location will be further away from the real one. This offers protectionwithin a larger area, but it might make the service provided by the website less useful.
By default all websites use the "medium" level (this can be changed from the Options tab). You can select a different level for a specific website usingthe icon. For instance, you could select a lower privacy level forwebsites that need an accurate location (eg. maps), and a higher one for websites that only needapproximate information (eg. weather forecast).
For more flexibility, each level can be configured from the Privacy Levelstab. The red circle is the protection area: locations in this area look plausible tobe the real one (see "What kind of privacy does Location Guardprovide?"). The blue circle is the accuracy: the fake location will be inside this circlewith high probability (note that the noise is random). Use the slider to adapt the two areas to yourneeds.
The privacy level can be set to "Use fixed location". In this case Location Guard always reports to the websitea predefined fixed location that never changes (instead of generating a fake location by addingnoise to the real one). This offers the highest privacy, since the reported location is completelyindependent from the real one, at the cost of very low accuracy.
When using a fixed Location, the browser's geolocation is not performed at all. This offersbetter privacy, since the list of wifi access points is not transmitted to Google's servers.However, it has the side effect that the permission dialog is not displayed at all.This behaviour is usually acceptable when the fixed location is dummy, but it canbe modified if you wish.
Some websitesdetect your location based on yourIP address (a numerical labelassociated with every device on the Internet), which is visible to all websites you visit. However, most of thetime this type of geolocation is not accurate and is limited to the city or postal/zip code level.Examples of such websites are iplocation.net andtracemyip.org.
Location Guard does not protect your IP address; it hides the location revealed by the browserthrough the JavaScript API, which is usually very accurate. More information about how thebrowser obtains your location can be found here.
To hide your IP address you need to use some anonymous communication system such asTor. Note, however, that even if your IP address ishidden, your browser can still reveal your location through JavaScript, so you need to also use Location Guard.
Location Guard takes your privacy seriously! First, the extension itself has no "specialpermission" to access your location, it can obtain it only when a website asks for it and only ifyou allow access in the permission dialog.
Location Guard also never stores your real location. The fake location is cached for asmall period of time; if a website asks for your location during this time the cached fake locationwill be returned. This improves privacy by avoiding to generate too many fake locations whichwould be centered around the real one. The cache period can be configured from the Privacy Levels tab and the cache can be deleted fromthe Options tab.What is the technology behind Location Guard?Location Guard is a product of research carried out at the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris,CNRS and Inria. It is based on work by Miguel Andrés,Nicolás Bordenabe,Kostas Chatzikokolakis,Catuscia Palamidessi andMarco Stronati.
Location Guard implements a location obfuscationtechnique based on adding noise from a 2-dimensionalLaplace distribution.This method can be formally shown to provide a privacy guarantee which is a variantof Differential Privacy.More details can be found in the paper below.
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Hide your geographic location from websites. Report a fake location with the addition of random noise in order to protect your privacy. Per site settings with three configurable levels of accuracy or even the possibility to use a fixed location.
Modern browsers such as Mozilla Firefox can tell websites where you're located in order to provide location-aware functionality. Your geographic location is obtained through various means (eg. using wifi data) and is often highly accurate, which can be a violation of your privacy.
This extension allows you to enjoy the useful applications of geolocation while protecting your privacy. It does so by reporting a fake location to websites, obtained by adding a certain amount of "noise" to the real location. The noise is randomly selected in a way that ensures that the real location cannot be inferred with high accuracy.
Three configurable privacy levels are provided. The higher the privacy level the greater the amount of noise, which gives better privacy at the expense of a less accurate fake location. This can be configured per-website for flexibility: a more accurate location can be provided for driving directions than for a weather forecast. There's also an option to use a fixed location, instead of adding noise to the real one. This offers the best privacy (no dependence on the real location at all), at the cost of very low accuracy.
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