[LINK] Geolocation

[David Lochrin]

Having tired of continual prompts to share my location, I disabled it completely in Firefox by going to <about:config> and searching for "geo" then toggling "geo.enabled" to false.

Apparently a user's location is derived from a database of many sources.  These include not only GPS data and data from mobile cell towers, but identifying data broadcast by WiFi networks where it's been correlated with location.  It seems Google were forced to stop collecting this information in Germany using their street-view vans. 

See http://benwerd.com/lab/geo.php and click on the link "How does this work?" at the bottom of the page.

If geolocation is enabled the above page will also tell you your estimated lattitude & longitude.  Only ADSL is enabled on the router here and my location was badly misjudged as being in Muswellbrook, 244.6Km away as the crow flies.  (The National Map at https://nationalmap.gov.au/ supports distance measurements).

Just in case anyone is interested...

David L.