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
143 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by Sergio, a month ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Radist, 2 months agoWorks well, thanks.
What I would need is to have some fixed "favorite" fake locations. - Rated 5 out of 5by xzilla, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by sirensynapse, 5 months agoWorks perfectly though it's not pinnable to the toolbar (FIX THIS!!!),. so getting through the multiple layers of settings to actually change things is a bitch. Go to manage extensions, then options then "use fixed location" to nail a location down.
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18403132, 7 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by nunesgh, 7 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by whthawk, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Argish, 9 months agoTh extension does what it says, use the 'Fixed Location' option if high precision location is not important for you. Read the FAQ. It does not change IP Location though, only Broswer Gelocation is changed (even without using GPS).
- Rated 5 out of 5by hotoke, 10 months ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by asavage, a year agoDespite claiming to be configurable on a per-site basis, I was unable to determine how to do this (extensive searching). And, if the extension's icon is supposed to be visible, it is not on my system (FF 121.0), and while I can find it in the overflow "Extensions" button on the toolbar, it is greyed-out and unresponsive. I uninstalled it after an hour, as I need its capabilities for ONE site, not all sites, and it does not appear to have this capability.
- Rated 5 out of 5by natsui, a year ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 15275119, a year ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 18161913, a year ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 17300163, a year ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by SuperCuek, a year ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Acuan, a year ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Krzysiu, a year agoPros:
- does what it is supposed to do
- simple
- tiny, not bloated
- uses OSM/Leaflet for settings instead Google Maps, so additional + for privacy
Cons:
- lack of per site settings (my reason of 4 instead 5 stars)
- doesn't give button to turn on/off extension (the only way is via Fx built-in mechanisms) - Rated 4 out of 5by Ben SALT.id, a year agoThis option seems making confuse between the fixed location and privacy level, causing wrong geo location..
- Rated 1 out of 5by radio_babylon, a year ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 12340338, a year ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 12165308, 2 years ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by 天灭中共退党团队保平安, 2 years ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by juan riccio, 2 years agoIt works - more or less - but the extension icon is not shown in the Firefox toolbar. Besides, I'd love it if I could have a per-site location. Some sites I don't want to hide my location from, some I do. It's hard to remember that before visiting the site.
We need more customization!