Risks of "Allow Location" in browser on my Librem

Hardware
1

For some reasons (don’t ask why) I’d like to use a website that only works if location is enabled.

  1. If I click “allow” in my browser, will my location be revealed on Librem Mini v2? What about Librem 14?
  2. Normally, what chip is used for location?
  3. If I remove this chip (or if this chip doesn’t even exist, which is my hope), what location would the website actually get? Latitude/longitude zero/zero or something else?
2

Most likely the “allow location” is your general area based on your public IP address.

3

The web site would already know your public IP address (by definition, if you communicated with them) and the databases to get a sometimes horribly inaccurate geographical location from an IP address are essentially public.

The only way round this is to use a VPN (where the VPN endpoint is chosen to be as far away from you as you desire).

Could depend on the browser.

If there’s no GNSS chip but there is WiFi then it may use a WiFi MAC address-to-geographical location database.

The following may help you to control (forge / fake) the location that is sent. https://beebom.com/fake-geo-location-google-chrome-mozilla-firefox-microsoft-edge/

If using Firefox then I recommend that you save the current value of geo.provider.network.url if it is not the default. (If it is the default then you can just revert to the default afterwards, if you so desire.)

NB: With the version of Firefox that I have, it is by default using Google to get the location, which means that I would be sharing the location with Google, as well as with a random web site - which is completely unacceptable. Fortunately I have disabled Location. Period.

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