Chrome for Android Now Supports Approximate Location

Google announced that “you can now choose to share your approximate location with websites, instead of sharing precise location” on Chrome for Android.

Websites can ask for your location for a variety of purposes whether it‘s to make a delivery or to give you real-time directions.

Some uses don’t require your exact location though, like checking your local weather. For those times, you can now provide a general location instead.

Both iOS and Android have supported approximate location at the OS level for a while. However, browsers strangely lack this feature.

Google says the feature will come to desktop “in the coming months.”

We’re also planning to release new APIs for web developers that will let them request approximate location or specify if they need precise location. We encourage developers to review their location needs and only ask for precise location when it’s required for the site functionality.

Google had a proposal for an Approximate Geolocation API as a standard browser feature for a while.

Google has several APIs that only work in Chromium-based browsers for now, such as the Battery Status API that let websites see how much battery you have and the Device Memory API that lets sites see approximately how much memory you have.

As you can imagine, these can be privacy concerns, especially in regards to fingerprinting. It’s no surprise that other browser vendors haven’t adopted them.

It seems that Mozilla is undecided on whether they support the standard or now, but WebKit has now come out as publicly supporting it. This is good news for support for this feature in more browsers in the future.

It only makes sense to support approximate location in browsers given it already exists for apps on iOS and Android. Websites are much less trusted than installed apps and as such they should have the least possible data on you in order to function.

Apps have been found, even unintentionally, to leak your location data to analytics companies and allow cross-app location tracking. For websites, there are even more untrusted parties involved.

Think of every site you visit, and how many of them randomly ask for your location. It can be very easy to unintentionally reveal your precise movements to a lot of parties.

This permission is a huge privacy win and I hope we can see widespread adoption soon. I’m not sure what Mozilla’s holdout is, but they should take another look and make a decision.