Browser Location Access: What It Actually Shares and How to Control It

When a website asks "Allow location access?" — most users either click Allow reflexively or Block without fully understanding what they're granting. Here's what browser location access actually means, what extensions can do with it, and how to make deliberate choices.

How Browser Location Access Works

The browser's Geolocation API lets websites request your location. When a site calls navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(), the browser shows a permission prompt. If you grant it, the browser returns a latitude/longitude coordinate to the page.

Where does that coordinate come from?

On desktop: Not GPS. Desktop browsers use a combination of:

• IP address geolocation (least accurate, usually city-level)
• Nearby Wi-Fi access point network IDs (if you've allowed it at OS level)
• Google Location Services or similar (via Firefox's default geolocation provider)

The accuracy on desktop varies from neighborhood-level (Wi-Fi triangulation) to city-level (IP-only). It's not your exact address.

On mobile: GPS is used if available, which is accurate to meters. Mobile location requests are much more precise than desktop.

What Gets Shared

When you grant location access to a site, the site receives:

• Latitude and longitude
• Accuracy radius (meters)
• Timestamp

That's it — no street address, no "home address," no place names. The website has to reverse geocode the coordinates to get a named location, which is an additional step they may or may not do.

Your IP address is always visible to sites, regardless of location permission. Many sites geolocate from IP before even requesting the Geolocation API.

Extensions and Location Access

Browser extensions are different from websites for location access. Extensions don't use the Geolocation API the same way — they have access to browser APIs that websites don't.

What extensions can access:

• If an extension has the geolocation permission listed in its manifest, it can query the browser's location service directly
• Extensions with broad permissions (<all_urls> or tabs) can observe which sites you grant location access to

What extensions typically do with location:
Most legitimate location-related extensions (weather, map, local search) request location to provide their core function — a weather extension needs your location to show weather. This is expected and appropriate.

Red flags: An extension that requests location access but whose stated purpose has nothing to do with location is worth scrutinizing.

The Weather Extension Case

Weather & Clock Dashboard for Firefox uses your location to show the weather for your area. The permissions requested are specifically for location and the ability to fetch weather data from an API (Open-Meteo).

The extension doesn't send your location to its own servers. It passes your coordinates to Open-Meteo (the weather data provider) to get forecast data. Open-Meteo is a public API with an open-data license; it doesn't have accounts or persistent tracking.

For users who don't want to share location even with the extension: you can enter a manual location by city name instead, and the extension will use that. No location permission required.

Managing Location Permissions in Firefox

Firefox gives you granular control over location access:

Per-site management: Settings → Privacy & Security → Permissions → Location → Settings. This shows every site that has asked for location access and what you answered. You can change individual site permissions here without affecting others.

Default behavior: You can set Firefox to block all location requests by default, prompt case-by-case (the default), or allow all. Settings → Privacy & Security → Permissions → Location → check "Block new requests asking to access your location" to default to block.

Incognito/private windows: Location permissions granted in a private window don't persist. The site has to ask again next time.

Practical Guidance

For most users:

Allow location for: mapping/navigation sites (Google Maps, OpenStreetMap), weather services, local search, delivery sites where location saves you typing your address.

Consider blocking for: news sites, social media platforms, general-purpose shopping sites, sites where your precise location has no clear functional use.

Always review when: a site you don't recognize or haven't used before asks for location, or a site asks for location but you can't figure out why they'd need it.

The permission prompt is there for a reason. Using it deliberately — not reflexively clicking Allow or Block — is the main privacy practice worth building.

Firefox's Built-in Location Protections

Firefox's default geolocation provider is different from Chrome's. Firefox defaults to routing geolocation queries through Mozilla's geolocation service (which uses Google Location Services under the hood but via Mozilla), which provides some additional privacy layer compared to Chrome's direct Google use.

For higher privacy: about:config → geo.provider.network.url can be changed to alternative providers, or geolocation can be disabled entirely by setting geo.enabled to false. This disables the API completely — all location requests will appear to fail to sites.

The practical privacy tradeoff: disabling geolocation entirely means weather extensions, map sites, and local search can't use your location, which is often the reason you're visiting them. The per-site permission model is a better balance for most users than a global block.