How in the Tech

Disabling Google Chrome’s geolocation feature

By Adam Myers ⋅ July 6, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Google Chrome, Privacy

Last year I wrote about how to disable a new feature introduced Firefox 3.5 – the ability for the browser to be aware of your geographical location. I’ve yet to come across a website that uses this feature in any earth-shattering manner and typically the only examples I can think of where this service would be useful aren’t in the users best interest or experience – I’m thinking location-based advertising. Privacy concerns aside, safe computing practices tells you to turn off or otherwise disable any feature you don’t use; so that’s what I outlined in Firefox.

As Google Chrome slowly cannibalizes most of my browsing sessions, it wasn’t long before I realized it too has the same geolocation feature. When you visit a geolocation-aware site, like Firefox, Chrome will present a dialog requesting permission for a website to track your physical location. At the time, this feature is configured to prompt for access by default – but it does have the capability to be enabled all the time, without any user confirmation. It’s not hard to envision some random malware, or even accidental clicking, enabling the feature 100% of the time.

While Firefox forced you to dig into it’s about:config settings to disable geolocation, Chrome presents the option right inside the user interface – which makes it a cinch to either check or change your existing setting.

In Chrome, click the Wrench icon and select Options.

Navigate to the Under the hood tab and click the Content settings button under Privacy.

In the Content Settings dialog you will see a list of Features, one of which is Location. That’s where we want to be. You will see three options that range from allowing all sites to not allowing any sites. Additionally, it’s possible to define site exceptions we could be handy in a few circumstances.

Once the change is applied, future visits to a website that has the geolocation tracking capability will result in a compass icon with a red icon over top of it being displayed in the address bar – signifying the site is unable to use your location.