The Geographic Prompts
When you visit a retail website, a restaurant portal, or a weather service in Google Chrome, the website will frequently execute a script asking for your exact GPS coordinates. This causes a small prompt to drop down from the address bar stating: “www.example.com wants to Know your location.” While this is helpful for finding a nearby store, the constant barrage of permission requests on almost every single commercial website is incredibly annoying. Furthermore, handing over your exact coordinates to third-party ad networks is a massive privacy risk. To protect your location data, you must block the browser from ever asking the question.
How to Turn Off Location Tracking Requests
You can permanently revoke Chrome’s permission to access your location hardware via the site settings.
- Open the Google Chrome desktop browser.
- Click the three vertical dots (⋮) in the top right corner and select Settings.
- In the left-hand sidebar, click on Privacy and security.
- In the main window, click on Site settings.
- Scroll down to the “Permissions” section and click on Location.
- At the top of the screen, under “Default behavior,” select the radio button next to “Don’t allow sites to see your location.”
Absolute Geographic Privacy
The change takes effect instantly. From this point forward, if a website attempts to run a script asking for your GPS coordinates, Google Chrome will silently block the request in the background. The annoying drop-down prompt will never appear, and the website will be completely unaware of where you are physically located.