Google and other search engines have come a long way. While they have facilitated us immensely, their highly-advanced algorithms and services come with their due share of frustrating and uninvited privacy intervention. For instance, when enabled, Google location services and maps track every step you take through your smartphone just like a virtual spy. It archives users’ activities and the places they visit. Spooky, isn’t it?
Many websites also access your location and send notifications. Sometimes providing location does make sense. For instance, while choosing the most suitable internet plan for yourself, it would be great to enable location. That way your customer services rep would be better able to help you find the exact plans available in your city/area. Other times, providing location isn’t needed at all, like when reading blogs online.
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Disabling Website Location and Desktop Alerts
These prompts and notifications won’t let you navigate the website until you tap the “Allow” or “Deny” tab. There’s no denying that features like desktop alerts and location tracking can be extremely helpful in some cases. For instance, if you don’t want to miss anything from your favorite clothing website or you like reading blogs of a particular writer, then desktop notifications can be great reminders.
However, for those who are done with seeing these prompts and want to get rid of them altogether, we will share some handy tips in this blog post. Let’s get it sorted once and for all.
Google Chrome
If you use Chrome as your main browser and want to turn off location tracking and desktop notifications for every website that you open on it, you need to:
- Go to the Main menu
- Tap Settings
- Again tap Show advanced configuration in Settings
- Go to Privacy Vault and tap Content settings
- Tap Location Y Notificationsin the dropdown menu
- Go to the Location section
- Select Don’t let any website track your physical location
- Now go to the Notifications section
- Tap Do not allow any website to show notifications
After that, if you want to allow some particular websites to continue sending you notifications or track your location, you can then go to Manage expectations. You can make changes accordingly.
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Firefox
Unlike Chrome, Firefox doesn’t have the main menu to disable the settings in question. However, we will guide you to use the hidden settings to disable these features completely. Start with typing about: config in your Firefox’s web address bar. Tap enter and also tap I accept the risk! From thereon, you will be able to access an extensive list of functions that you can modify.
To prevent websites from sending you prompts about enabling location tracking, add geo.enabled in your Firefox’s address bar and change it to False. To keep desktop notifications at bay, write dom.webnotifications.enabled within your browser’s address bar. Again, change to False to avoid these notifications completely.
Now you are good to go!
Microsoft Edge
Unfortunately, Microsoft Edge doesn’t offer any convenient way to disable location tracking and desktop notifications. And there is no option at all to disable desktop notifications. You will have to bear with them. However, once you deny them, Edge will remember your command.
As far as the location tracking is concerned, you can disable it by accessing the settings on Windows 10. From the menu, navigate to Settings. Hit the Privacy section next. Select the Location menu and you will see a list of all the universal Windows apps. All you have to do is to switch off the toggle right next to MS Edge. This will prevent websites that you open on Edge from tracking your location.
Safari
Just like Chrome, it is easier to turn off location tracking and desktop notifications on Safari. However, you may experience trouble whilst dealing with location tracking on Apple’s browser. Here is what you need to do:
- Go to the menu
- Tap Preferences
- Go to the Privacy tab
- Scroll to see Use of the location services website and click Deny without asking
This will effectively disable all the location tracking alerts and prompts. Furthermore, you can’t manage expectations. However, Safari will remember the sites you have disabled location tracking for. You have the freedom to allow certain websites to track your location.
For the notification alerts:
- Go to Preferences
- Tap Notifications
- You will see Allow websites to request permission to send push notifications. Uncheck it
This will prevent all the websites from sending you unwanted prompts to allow notifications. You also get to manage the websites from which you want to receive notifications. You will see the websites allowed to send desktop alerts in the middle of the Notifications section.
We have covered all the popular search engines. Hope this guide is helpful.
