By default, Windows tracks the current location of your computer. Depending on your hardware configuration, it evaluates location data from various sensors on your device.
If your PC has a GPS chip, its location can be accurately pinpointed. In the rare case your PC has a SIM card, Windows can triangulate its location using the signal strengths of surrounding phone towers. Windows can also check the names of Wi-Fi networks and the MAC addresses of nearby access points and compare them to an international database to determine your system’s location. Your PC’s external IP address also provides a rough estimate of where you are.
If all these methods fail, the operating system falls back on the default location, which you can define in Windows Settings under Privacy & security > Location > Default location:
Don’t want Windows and Microsoft to always know your last location? You can turn off location tracking. Then, neither your operating system nor your installed apps will have access to this data.
You have two ways to do this.
You can open Windows Settings and navigate to Privacy & security > Location, then toggle “Location services” to Off. Doing this will prevent Windows and Microsoft Store apps from accessing location data.
However, regular desktop apps that you download and install from the web (i.e., not via the Microsoft Store) will still be able to determine your location independently without the location services of Windows (e.g., by evaluating nearby available Wi-Fi networks).
You can leave “Location services” as On in Windows Settings and enable the “Allow apps to access your location” setting. This gives you the option of deciding on an app-by-app basis (which are listed in the setting) which ones can access your location. Only apps that were installed via the Microsoft Store will appear in this list:
The “Allow desktop apps to access your location” setting controls whether desktop apps are allowed to use Windows location services. Below that, you can see which apps have most recently done so.
The “Allow location override” setting is used to configure remote PCs that are connected to a server system using the Remote Desktop feature. If location services are active on both computers, different locations can be used for the server and the client:
Finally, under the “Recent activity” setting, you can see which apps have recently requested location data. If you set “Allow apps to access your location” to Off, the “Notify when apps request location” setting appears at the bottom of this window, allowing you to set whether Windows should show a notification when an app attempts to access your location despite being prohibited from doing so. For security reasons, it’s recommended that you leave this option enabled.
Further reading: All the ways Windows 11 collects data about you
Author: Roland Freist
Source: PCWorld
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
