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smartphones are pretty great right when you're out looking for the nearest
all-night dumpling house that handy-dandy gadget in your pocket can
use gps satellites to triangulate your position and direct you to the nearest
food fix but what about the times when you'd rather not have the powers that be
tracking your location maybe while you're sitting at home on your pc you
fire up a mapping site in your web browser and
wait a minute this thing doesn't have gps but it knows where i am down to a
few meters what black magic is this well
part of the way your location can be determined is by looking at your public
ip address which every site you visit needs so that it knows where to send the
data you request now each isp owns a
certain range of ip addresses that correspond to different geographic
locations often the particular city that they then assign to customers and since
these addresses are assigned to your isp by large registries who make location
data public it's easy for most sites to know your general location assuming you
aren't using a vpn or something like that but that still doesn't explain how
google maps can place a blue dot directly on my house i mean did larry
page's personal helicopter just fly over well no unless you're using a desktop pc
that's a few years old you're on a device that probably supports wi-fi and
if your wi-fi router has ever connected to or even just been in range of a gps
enabled gadget like a smartphone this is some next level stuff right here that
phone will actually take note of the mac addresses the unique identifiers for
every network-enabled device of all the wireless access points that are close
enough for them to see then it'll for that information along
with the phone's location to a database maintained by google if you're on
Android or apple if you're on iOS whoa so these companies know where a
huge number of the access points and routers floating around out there are
located even if they aren't public and if a router gets moved to a different
location these databases will likely be updated the next time a phone connects
to it now obviously this is hugely convenient for using services that need
to know your location when you don't have a good gps signal not to mention
that gps alone is a battery hog and takes a lot longer to triangulate your
location than the wi-fi database but i can't say i'd blame you if you
weren't concerned about these companies keeping tabs on where every wireless
router lives even the one that sits on your countertop in your kitchen so is
there any way to opt out of this well yes in theory it seems like every other
week we found out that oops it turns out we were logging all that data you told
us not to anyway lol sorry but anyway in
theory microsoft and google allow you to keep your router out of their location
databases for google you can add underscore no map to the end of your
wi-fi network's name or ssid while microsoft offers a web page where you
can enter your ap's Mac Address which you can usually find on an attached
sticker but there doesn't appear to be a similar escape hatch for apple at this time go
figure and if you want to keep your client devices for being tracked again
in theory disable location or location services on Android or iOS and don't
allow your browser to send your location to websites if you're on a desktop pc
now they're typically configured to ask you first anyway but it's worth double
checking because if you do send your location out even using a vpn may not
help obscure where you are if your pc has a wi-fi connection that can see
surrounding networks even if you're only using a wired connection at the time so
make sure that you disable your wi-fi outright if you're concerned about
others knowing where you are and speaking about others knowing where
you are this episode has been brought to you by tunnelbear the easy to use vpn app when
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of things and there are a bunch of other devices trying to connect to yours kill
switches stop this from happening before you connect to your vpn all of your
traffic is unencrypted so in the few seconds it takes to connect you've
probably already broadcast your ip maybe a few dns requests or even a search
query vigilant bear from tunnelbear stops this from happening by blocking
all inbound and outbound traffic so nothing leaks out before you connect
this helps keep you private throughout your entire connection time if your
connection goes down for some reason vigilant bearer kicks back in and stops
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