Windows 10: Windows 10 is disclosing my location to my browser in private mode. Even though I have all...

Howdy-

I have "Location for this device" turned to off. "Allow applications to access your location" turned to off. I have also set a default location in Windows settings to where I want to appear to be. I am running PIA VPN as an application to the location and also running the VPN in the browser to the application I want to appear to be.

When I open a private window in both FireFox and Edge and go to bing maps and google maps. This is the behaviour: It opens to where I have connected to the VPN. However, when I click "allow this site to access your location" it can pinpoint my actual location.

This tells me even though I have set Windows 10 to not allow any apps to access my location it still is allowing the browser apps to access the location given by the GPS chip in the laptop. The Laptop is an new Model IBM T480.

I found one reference to this issue in the subreddit and it was about cortana. I am not signed in to cortana and it also occurs in Firefox.

This feels like a privacy leak at the nasty level.

Anyone seen this behaviour before? I wonder if I can disable the GPS chip of the laptop in the BIOS?

submitted by /u/dickless_cheney
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:)

 

Microsoft’s Edge browser may be storing private browsing data

Read more: Microsoft's Edge browser may be storing private browsing data | The Verge

 

Set Network Location to Private or Public in Windows 10  

Hi Brink and thank you for the welcome

I tried what you suggested but when doing this, i noticed that whenever i am connected to my VPN, the Windows network shows up as "unidentified network" instead of network 1,2,3 or whatever. So when i went into regedit and looked for networks, i found some but none called unidentified.
There was one network with the value 0 so i changed it to 1 (private) but after checking, my VPN connection still shows as public.

I am not really sure why it says unidentified network in Windows when i am connected to the VPN but it seems that this is the cause for the problem. If i could only find the VPN network in the list of networks in regedit, i think i would be able to change the value to 1.

Hmm..not sure how to proceed with this. Any ideas?

 

Why is Cortana tracking my location even though location services are turned off?

"Cortana collects your location periodically even if you’re not interacting with her, like when you connect to Wi Fi or disconnect from Bluetooth. When Cortana is turned on, the Search app also has access to your device
location information and will automatically send it to Bing when Cortana suggests web search terms and results for Bing to use as described in the privacy statement. If you don’t want Cortana to have access to your device location, you need to turn off Cortana
completely:

• Go to Cortana > Notebook > Settings .
• Turn off the setting Cortana can give you suggestions, ideas, reminders, alerts and more"

So there is no way to prevent Microsoft from collecting my location data EVEN
WHEN LOCATION SERVICES ARE TURNED OFF except by turning off Cortana completely. Fine. I'll do that. Too bad the setting "Cortana can give you suggestions, ideas, reminders, alerts and more" doesn't seem to exist.