Geolocation

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Geolocation is a service that allows web pages to request the coordinates of your physical location. You might see this on a map where you click a button for the map to show you your position on the map. Alternatively, you might see a prompt when visiting a website, where the website has asked for your permission to see your location.

Unfortunately, our existing geolocation provider is no longer able to provide us with a service, due to new legal restrictions. Because of how important privacy is, especially when it comes to something as sensitive as your exact location, we will only trust a geolocation provider that respects your privacy. So for now, we are looking into the available providers, and testing them to see if their coverage is good enough to serve our user base. Currently, on Windows we use Windows’ geolocation service, but on macOS and Linux geolocation has been disabled. This is not a situation we are happy with, and we are trying hard to find a solution. Your privacy is just too important to us.

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How geolocation works

Your location can be detected using your device’s GPS sensors, if your computer or device has a GPS sensor. However, if your device does not have a GPS sensor, the browser can request your location from a geolocation provider. Typically, it sends the geolocation provider limited details of the WiFi networks that your computer can see. The geolocation provider uses known WiFi network locations and strengths to calculate your likely position. If it is unable to do so using the networks in your area, then it may resort to using an even more approximate geographical IP address lookup, using a large database of the approximate locations of all IP addresses. These databases were common before geolocation services became popular, and require constant maintenance, as IP addresses are frequently re-allocated to different providers.

The geolocation provider returns the longitude and latitude of the location that it calculates, and these coordinates are all that the website gets to see.

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Protecting your privacy

Your exact physical location is one of the most important pieces of personal data, and typically, you might not want websites or other people to be able to see your exact location. If you trust a website enough to give it permission to see your location, Vivaldi stores your choice, so that next time you visit that website, you will not have to give it permission again. This permission is only allowed to be given to secure websites. When a page accesses your location, a geolocation icon will appear in the address field in Vivaldi for desktop. You can revoke permission using the geolocation icon or by clicking on Site Info in the address field. You can set the default location permission to Allow or Block, using Settings > Webpages.

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Are there any alternatives?

Although geolocation is currently disabled on macOS and Linux, there is a way that you can provide a location for websites to use:

1. Load a page that wants to see your location, but do not agree to any Geolocation request yet.
2. Open Developer Tools using  Vivaldi menu > Tools > Developer Tools (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).
3. Click on the vertical ellipsis in the top right corner of the Developer Tools window.
4. > More Tools >Sensors.
5. Choose a Geolocation override or click Manage to define a new one.
6. Once an override is selected, you can allow the Geolocation request from the geolocation icon in the address field.

For subsequent visits, instead of steps 3 and 4, select the Sensors tab in the bottom panel of the Developer Tools.
To provide your actual location, you will need to either find this on a map which exposes latitude and longitude as numbers. There are normally apps available to do this on your system, using your system’s geolocation service.