Unite

Spoofing your location

By SC.sagar. Tuesday, March 1, 2011 2:08:35 PM

Did you know that websites today can request your location to detect where you are, and offer content or services accordingly? Opera of course requests your permission before sharing your location.

Give it a try at HTML5 Geolocation demo page.

With the Geolocation Provider Opera Unite app, you can easily spoof your location. Note: The app is still of alpha quality though.

Here is what you need to do:

Install and start the Geolocation Provider Opera Unite app
Setup your latitude, longitude, altitude etc. and save the configuration
Now configure Opera to use your Opera Unite Geolocation URL (find it in the app)
Try the HTML5 Geolocation demo page now to see your spoofed location.

Here's me blogging this from Antarctica.

Note: Your IP address is not spoofed. That can still be used to determine your location.

Widgetise any web siteTake a bow hanomu!

Comments

d4rkn1ght # Tuesday, March 1, 2011 3:27:50 PM

Sweet!

Witold Barylukmovax # Tuesday, March 1, 2011 4:42:01 PM

Strange. One of links gives HTTP 404, and other gives "application is not available for your platform". I use Opera 11.50 alpha on Linux, and had no problem with this application in past at all.

And it is not alpha, it works. It lacks some useful features, but is stable, do not have bugs i know and not alpha (but i just written so, as I do not give any guarant it will work).

I have prepared newer version, but still lack some free time to polish it.

PS. On 11.10 it shows up. Pretty confusing.

ouzowtfouzoWTF # Tuesday, March 1, 2011 7:27:42 PM

The HTML5 Geolocation demo found me over 500km away from where I actually am. And that without changing my location as described above. Geolocation was never that inaccurate.

Witold Barylukmovax # Tuesday, March 1, 2011 8:52:29 PM

Originally posted by ouzoWTF:

Geolocation was never that inaccurate

It is based on Google's data about available wifi access points. If you connect using wired connection (i.e. ethernet), or have only your small AP in home visible from your laptop (so you do not see other wifis, and also other persons cannot easly see your access point), or you live somewhere where google not yet mapped any wifi access points, then it will be based only on IP address (but know that google will log a wifis you send to them, and IP you connected from, and will try to correlate this information in the future, for example with other wifis you see from time to time, or when you are in another room...).

So in case of IP based geolocation, it can be very inaccurate, as often IP only lead to knowledge about Country, or sometimes City, depening what informations are storred in Whois databases, not exact location. And often if Internet Service Provider is very big, and distributed, their all IP address they manage, will still be treated as single entry (range) in whois databases, and will point in most cases to the HQ of the ISP, not actually client location. Which in most situations is good, as most clients do not want to publish publicly their locations, names, telephones, and other contact informations.

ouzowtfouzoWTF # Tuesday, March 1, 2011 11:35:17 PM

I know all that, but the accuracy of my wired connection was in worst cases 2km, not 500km. And my ISP did not change in the last years.
Thanks anyway for your detailed description

Charles SchlossChas4 # Friday, March 4, 2011 12:30:44 AM

Charles McCathieNevilechaals # Wednesday, March 23, 2011 8:07:31 AM

One of the things I love about this app is that it can log requests. So if you have a few known points, and you start walking around collecting more, you could begin to create your own geo-location database (e.g. for a city) and use that instead of the default Google engine.

(Another of the things I love is that shortly after I started thinking about doing an app like this I discovered it already existed