Disabling Geolocation in Firefox

If you've ever seen this box below your Firefox tabs, then you've encountered Firefox's location aware browsing ((C) Kai Hendry)

You may not have realised it, but the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox include a geolocation feature to enable location aware browsing.
This allows you to give permission to share your location with websites, and is on by default.

Websites will use your location so that they can tailor information to your local area. For example, a high street shop could automatically show you where your nearest branch is.

It works by collecting information about your computers IP address and wireless access points that your computer can see and comparing it to a database to estimate your current position. The default database provider is the Google Location Service, although that can be changed to another geolocation service provider.

Location Aware Browsing is designed to protect your personal information: You have to manually approve each website that requests your location, and all communication with the geolocation service is anonymised and encrypted. However, if you don’t want the feature to be active at all, you can disable it.

You can stop this warning from appearing again, but I smile every time I see it, so I've kept it

First, open a new browser tab in Firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar. This will show a warning because you’re accessing advanced settings, so acknowledge it and continue.

Type “geo.” into the filter box at the top of the page to only show geolocation service options. In Firefox 3.6.8 there are four settings related to geolocation. Find the setting called “geo.enabled” and double click on it so that it’s set to “false”. You have now disabled location aware browsing and can close the about:config tab, but if you ever want to re-enable it, all you need to do is change geo.enabled back to true.

Of the other settings, “geo.wifi.uri” is the most interesting, as it determines the location service provider to access, whilst the other two are used by the Google Location Service.

What do you think of this service? Does it bother you that it’s on by default? Do you have any privacy concerns or are you happy with the steps already taken to protect your privacy? Why not add your thoughts in the comment section.