Personal computing discussed

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meerkt
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Re: How does Google (desktop) infer location?

Fri May 31, 2019 4:31 pm

DPete27 wrote:
If you're logged in to chrome with your gmail account

I'm not using Chrome, in Google's web settings history/whatever are off, on the desktop I'm only logged in when checking email, my phone Gmail accounts are per phone and unrelated to my "real" Gmail address that's used for email.
 
Yan
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Re: How does Google (desktop) infer location?

Fri May 31, 2019 7:56 pm

I've always assumed that Google uses cookies to track your searches and other information, and can use that to guess your location. Solution: delete Google's cookies, or all cookies, or use another search engine. And don't use Gmail or other Google services, of course.
 
Redocbew
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Re: How does Google (desktop) infer location?

Fri May 31, 2019 9:25 pm

That might work if Google wasn't also one of the biggest advertisers on the web. Avoiding their services isn't so simple as avoiding Gmail and google.com. The fuss over cookies has always been a bit silly, because you don't need to store anything on the client in order to keep track of search history or location. Perhaps there was more to it before asynchronous javascript was a thing, but that was a long time ago.
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just brew it!
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Re: How does Google (desktop) infer location?

Sat Jun 01, 2019 3:19 am

Yan wrote:
I've always assumed that Google uses cookies to track your searches and other information, and can use that to guess your location. Solution: delete Google's cookies, or all cookies, or use another search engine. And don't use Gmail or other Google services, of course.

Not sure why you think cookies are needed for tracking location. They're not tied to a physical location; they're tied to a device (which may or may not stay in the same place). As we've been discussing for this entire thread, IP address is a better indicator. If you really care about hiding your location, use a proxy to mask your IP.

There are indeed potential privacy issues with cookies, but tracking your physical whereabouts isn't one of them.

And as Redocbew notes, using another search engine doesn't hide you from Google because they are also the ad provider for a large percentage of web sites. As soon as you click a link, Google probably knows about it regardless of which search engine you used.
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meerkt
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Re: How does Google (desktop) infer location?

Sat Jun 01, 2019 6:19 am

I tend to cleanup cookies occasionally but the location is detected regardless.
And if Google uses browser fingerprinting, cookies might not be needed because I use less common browsers.
 
jihadjoe
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Re: How does Google (desktop) infer location?

Sat Jun 01, 2019 9:29 am

I remember reading something on Arstechnica a year or two ago about cross-browser fingerprinting techniques having been developed that can uniquely identify a machine 99% of the time even across multiple browsers (or nuking cookies).

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