Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button and enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so smartphones were pretty great right when you're out looking for the nearest all-night dumpling house that handy-dandy gadget in your pocket can use GPS satellites to triangulate your position and direct you to the nearest food fix but what about the times when you'd rather not have the powers-that-be tracking your location maybe while you're sitting at home on your PC you fire up a mapping site in your web browser and wait a minute this thing doesn't have GPS but it knows where I am down to a few meters what black magic is this well part of the way your location can be determined is by looking at your public IP address which every site you visit needs so that it knows where to send the data you request now each isp owns a certain range of IP addresses that correspond to different geographic locations often the particular city that they then assigned the customers and since these addresses are assigned to your isp by large registries who make location data public it's easy for most sites to know your general location assuming you aren't using a VPN or something like that but that still doesn't explain how Google Maps can place a blue dot directly on my house I mean did Larry page's personal helicopter just fly over well no unless you're using a desktop PC that's a few years old you're on a device that probably supports Wi-Fi and if your Wi-Fi router has ever connected to or even just been in range of a gps-enabled gadget like a smart phone this is some next-level stuff right here that phone will actually take note of the MAC addresses the unique identifiers for every network enabled device of all the wireless access points that are close enough for them to see then it'll for that information along with the phone's location to a database maintained by Google if you're on Android or Apple if you're on iOS whoa so these companies know were a huge number of the access points and routers floating around out there or located even if they aren't public and if a router gets moved to a different location these say the basis will likely be updated the next time a phone connects to it now obviously this is hugely convenient for using services that need to know you look when you don't have a good GPS signal not to mention that GPS alone is a battery hog and takes a lot longer to try you late your location than the Wi-Fi ADA base but I can't say I'd blame you if you weren't concerned about these companies keeping tabs on where every wireless router lives even the one that sits on your countertop in your kitchen so is there any way to opt out of this well yes in theory it seems like every other week we found out that oops it turns out we were logging all that data you told us not to you anyway lol sorry but anyway in theory Microsoft and Google allow you to keep your router out of their location databases for google you can add underscore no map to the end of your Wi-Fi networks name or SSID while microsoft offers a web page where you can enter your aps MAC address which you can usually find on an attached sticker but there doesn't appear to be a similar escape hatch for Apple at this time go figure and if you want to keep your client devices for being tracked again in theory disable location or location services on Android or iOS and don't allow your browser to send your location to web sites if you're on a desktop PC now they're typically configured to ask you first anyway but it's worth double-checking because if you do send your location out even using a VPN may not help ask you where you are if your PC has a Wi-Fi connection that can see surrounding networks even if you're only using a wired connection at the time so make sure that you disable your Wi-Fi outright if you're concerned about others knowing where you are and speaking about others knowing where you are this episode has been brought to you by tunnel bear the easy to use VPN app when people are shopping for a VPN one of the features they look for our kill switches before you connect to a network your device starts to send information about itself and what it wants to do it tries to establish connections with all sorts of things and there are a bunch of other devices trying to connect to yours kill switches stop this from happening before you connect to your VPN all of your traffic is unencrypted so in the few seconds it takes to connect you've probably already broadcast your IP maybe a few DNS requests or even a search query Vigilant bear from tunnel bear stops us from happening by blocking all inbound and outbound traffic so nothing leaks out before you connect this helps keep your private throughout your entire connection time if your connection goes down for some reason vigil and Barrett kicks back in and stops all outbound and inbound traffic until the connection comes back for a free trial of tunnel Barrett go to Toa better calm / Linus ok guys thanks for watching tech quickie like the video if you liked it dislike it if you didn't check out our other channels make sure to leave a comment below with video suggestions I do read those and your input is always very much appreciated and be sure to subscribe and follow so you don't miss any of our future videos