Friday, February 22, 2013

Digital Inspiration Technology Blog: How to Fake your Location in Google Chrome

Digital Inspiration Technology Blog
Digital Inspiration is an award-winning how-to tech blog around all things related to computer software, web applications, mobile and personal productivity.
How to Fake your Location in Google Chrome
Feb 22nd 2013, 18:02

Sometimes websites may request access to your location so that they can serve more relevant information. For instance, if you are looking for a gas station, a maps website may use your current geographic location to display stations that are near your place.

Share Location in Chrome

Google Chrome will only share your location if you click Allow.

How Browsers Determine your Location

Earlier, websites would use the IP address to determine your approximate location but with the HTML5 Geolocation API, web browsers can more accurately detect your location using data from GPS, Wi-Fi networks, cell towers, Bluetooth and of course the IP address.

To give you an example, open the Where am I app in your browser, allow it to use your location information and the app should be able to display your latitude and longitude coordinates (it is more accurate on mobile browsers as those devices have built-in GPS).

Fake your Geolocation Coordinates

When you happen to visit a location-aware website, the browser will always ask for a confirmation before sharing your location. If you aren’t keen to share your geographic coordinates, you can always deny that request or, if you are using Google Chrome, you can even send a fake location to the website.

Here's how. Press F12 (or Ctrl + Shift + I) in Google Chrome to open the Developer Tools. Click the Settings icon in the lower right corner and switch to the Overrides tab (see the next screenshot). Now you can specify the exact latitude and longitude coordinates* that you want to share with that website.

[*] You can use the Postal Address finder to know the latitude and location of a place.

Make sure that the "Override Geolocation" setting is checked and then refresh the page to send that fake location. And this is obviously a useful feature for web developers who would like to test their geolocation-enabled apps from the same location.

Related tip: Geotag your Tweets with any Location

Override Geolocation in Chrome

Manually set you geolocation in Chrome

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, How to Fake your Location in Google Chrome, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 22/02/2013 under Google Chrome, Location, Internet.

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