But geolocationdoes raise the alarm bells of some users who prefer not to be traceable at all. Geolocation is by default disabled in Firefox.

Google Chrome handles the matter slightly different. Geolocation is enabled but will only be accessible by a website or service is the user accepts it first.

A confirmation message like the one above will be displayed whenever the user opens a website that makes use of the location feature in Google Chrome.

Users who never make use of the geolocation feature can disable it easily in the browser’s options. Please note that geolocation is a feature of Google Chrome 5 and not available in previous versions of the web browser.

Click on the tools icon and then on Options in Google Chrome. Switch to the Under the Bonnet tab and click the Content settings button.

Switch to the Location tab in the new Content Settings window.

Three possible states for the geolocation feature are offed:

• Allow all sites to track my physical location
• Ask me when a site tries to track my physical location (recommended)
• Do not allow any site tot rack my physical location

The second option is the default option. Just switch to the do not allow any site to track my physical location option to block all geolocation requests automatically.

Firefox users can take a look at the guide to disable location aware browsing in Firefox to check and disable geolocation in their web browser if necessary.

You can test the browser’s geolocation feature on this website.

A click on the Share Location button will share the current location with the website while a click on Don’t Share will prevent it.

To be precise, the following information will be send to the website:

Your computer’s IP address,
Information about the nearby wireless access points, and
A random client identifier, which is assigned by Google, that expires every 2 weeks.

Firefox users who never intend to use the geolocation feature might want to disable it permanently. This can be done easily by typing [about:config] in the Firefox address bar to open the Firefox configuration. The feature can now be disabled by entering [geo.enabled] into the Filter form at the top and pressing the enter key. The geo.enabled parameter should now be displayed. The easiest way to disable geolocation is to double-click the entry so that the Value displays false afterwards.

You find more information about geolocation on the Location-Aware browsing page over at Mozilla which also explains how to get remove permissions that have already been granted to websites and the random client identification number.