Location Guard

Websites you are visiting in your browser might collect information about you and your browsing habits, including your geolocation, based on the IP address.   Location Guard is one of the tools you can use to prevent disclosing your real location to the immersive world of the Internet. Of course, there are also other ways to conceal your location, but this is simply a browser extension available for Chrome and Edge that does the trick without having to install third-party standalone software.

The add-on is easily installed, and the new icon is displayed right next to the address bar in Chrome (or Edge, if that is your preferred browser). By default, the privacy level is set to medium, but you can change it for every website you visit. The extension can also be paused, if needed.

Additional control parameters are found in the Options window. Here, you are free to change the privacy level and, what’s more, Location Guard allows you to use the real location or a fixed location for the website you are currently visiting. In the latter case, Location Guard reports a predefined location to websites you visit, a location that never changes, instead of generating a fake location by adding noise to the real one.

And speaking of noise, let’s talk about how this extension actually works. The add-on intercepts the communication between the visited website and the geolocation provider. With your permission, it adds random noise to your real location, creating a fake one that is transmitted to the website. This also generates a so-called “protection area”, ensuring that the website cannot distinguish between the fake and the real location.

The privacy level, a parameter that you can modify, determines the amount of noise that Location Guard adds to your real location. Evidently, the higher the protection level, the more noise is added, making the fake location seem further away from the real one.

Location Guard is a simple but handy extension that can conceal your real location while using Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. By adding noise to your real location, it manages to report a fake location to the websites you visit, thus protecting your privacy.