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Author Topic: Site knows my location with VPN, no cookies, geolocation disabled  (Read 3024 times)

Offline zephyrus

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I set up BloackVPN and went to dnsleaktest.com in Firefox and it identified my location as Prague, which it should have. So I assumed it worked. Then I went to npr.org and it sent me directly to my local NPR station, correctly identifying my real location. The same thing happened in Chrome. I checked cookies in both browsers. Only Chrome had cookies set for npr.org. I deleted them and npr.org could no longer identify my location in Chrome. I went back to Firefox and there were no cookies for npr.org there. Cookies were not the problem. I checked the geo.enabled setting and it was enabled, so I disabled it and restarted the browser. The setting was disabled after I  restarted Firefox but it still knows my location. How is it detecting my location? Other sites will be able to do the same thing so I would like to get to the bottom of this problem. Is there a way for sites to set secret cookies in Firefox? Could it be BlackVPN not working correctly? What else could the problem be?

Offline zephyrus

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Re: Site knows my location with VPN, no cookies, geolocation disabled
« Reply #1 on: June 13, 2017, 04:04:05 PM »
Upon further investigation of this problem, I discovered that I had a phantom Firefox process still running in the background even after I shut Firefox down. It must have been preserving the cookies somehow. The problem went away when I killed all Firefox processes and started it again.