The key facts

  • Consenting to geolocation usually gives a site the right to learn your coordinates on every visit and pass them to third parties
  • The expert listed the risks: fraudsters, stalkers, burglary planning, social engineering and different prices by district
  • Recommendation: grant access only to maps, taxi and delivery services, and periodically check permissions in the browser

What happens when you click 'Allow'

Millions of users every day agree to the browser's request for geolocation access without reading the terms carefully. Weather sites, delivery services and online stores regularly ask for this access, however, as told Gazeta.Ru, the product director of the Stakhanovets company, IT and information security expert Alexey Mironov, such consent is not a formality but the transfer of data about a person's life to third parties.

How the data is used and what risks are cited

According to Mironov, by agreeing once, the user most often gives the site the right to learn their coordinates on every visit, keep a history of movements, and pass the data to advertising networks and analytics services — formally this is described in the user agreement, which almost no one reads. Geolocation is valuable for advertising: knowing where you go, sites show nearby stores, and from your routes they can figure out where a person lives and works. The expert noted that many sites make money selling such data to brokers.

The listed threats and recommendations

Mironov listed the main risks: a history of movements can fall into the hands of fraudsters or stalkers; knowing when a person leaves home makes it easier to plan a burglary; location data strengthens social engineering — calls 'confirming' your address sound more convincing. In addition, some services show different prices depending on the district, and the site itself can become the victim of a hack even without any wrongdoing on its part. As a precaution, the expert advised granting geolocation access only where it is really needed — maps, taxi and delivery — while a weather site only needs the city entered manually. He also recommended periodically checking the list of permissions in the browser and revoking access from unneeded services: according to him, granting access only to necessary apps reduces the risks to almost zero.

Connection with previous publications on the topic

The article continues Gazeta.Ru's series of publications on digital security: the outlet previously explainedhow to check whether a user is being spied on through the camera and microphone. Both publications are advisory in nature and rely on expert commentary rather than data on specific incidents.