Reviews for Location Guard
Location Guard by Kostas Chatzikokolakis, Marco Stronati
Review by Firefox user 15930114
Rated 4 out of 5
by Firefox user 15930114, 3 years agoPlease understand what this extension does, and what it does not do.
It does not: SPOOF your IP address. Hundreds of VPN solutions already do that today.
It does: Change how your browser reports your current location based on the computer's understanding of your location. This can be based on a GPS chip, a wifi-location service, and other things including your date/time settings.
This extension was hard to use, but it does work. Here are some tips:
1) If you are on mac, clicking "Allow" when a page requests your location is NOT all you have to do! And firefox did not warn me. You need to go into the system preferences and TURN ON location services for that application. Bad on firefox for not letting us know it is blocked. Instead, after clicking "allow" the extension reports "User denied access to location". Such BS.
2) The extension icon, mentioned as being "green" in the documentation, just does not exist. The only way to get at the controls is through the dialog that pops up when you add the location guard plugin. As a workaround, you can save the extension's URL to access the prefs: moz-extension://e87208ff-5495-274e-aaf9-bdc1f972d413/options.html That is REALLY annoying.
This application is written by security researchers who did a pretty good job by creating this for a simple presentation. As the browsers update themselves it is hard to keep these things working. This one is still working today (7/23/2021) with the caveats above. It's hard for them to stay motivated of course when every mom and pop and would-be techno-nerd who doesn't really know what he's doing is throwing shade at the guys. Personally I hope they will keep it up to date but you can help them out on github with pull requests. Here are the known issues. Nothing to stop folks from helping out. https://github.com/chatziko/location-guard/issues
It does not: SPOOF your IP address. Hundreds of VPN solutions already do that today.
It does: Change how your browser reports your current location based on the computer's understanding of your location. This can be based on a GPS chip, a wifi-location service, and other things including your date/time settings.
This extension was hard to use, but it does work. Here are some tips:
1) If you are on mac, clicking "Allow" when a page requests your location is NOT all you have to do! And firefox did not warn me. You need to go into the system preferences and TURN ON location services for that application. Bad on firefox for not letting us know it is blocked. Instead, after clicking "allow" the extension reports "User denied access to location". Such BS.
2) The extension icon, mentioned as being "green" in the documentation, just does not exist. The only way to get at the controls is through the dialog that pops up when you add the location guard plugin. As a workaround, you can save the extension's URL to access the prefs: moz-extension://e87208ff-5495-274e-aaf9-bdc1f972d413/options.html That is REALLY annoying.
This application is written by security researchers who did a pretty good job by creating this for a simple presentation. As the browsers update themselves it is hard to keep these things working. This one is still working today (7/23/2021) with the caveats above. It's hard for them to stay motivated of course when every mom and pop and would-be techno-nerd who doesn't really know what he's doing is throwing shade at the guys. Personally I hope they will keep it up to date but you can help them out on github with pull requests. Here are the known issues. Nothing to stop folks from helping out. https://github.com/chatziko/location-guard/issues