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Locate Me Windows 10

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infantryman

Occasional Visitor
Yesterday, I did some tests with the '' Locate Me '' feature in Windows 10 Home edition.

First, here is the way my devices are plugged in together and also some details about their settings:

Desktop --> Cat6 --> Router (RT-AC86U) --> Modem (Technicolor provided by ISP).

Router: The router is set as a VPN client (OpenVPN), connected 24/7 to NordVPN. (Router is connected to a server in Toronto but I do not live in this city. I'm like 250km away). The router's DNS IP was manually entered and provided to me by NordVPN. Of course, the Firewall is enabled and all stuff like uPnP, Ping from WAN, Remote Access, SSH, etc. are disabled for security reasons.

Desktop: Gaming tower with ethernet card. Browser: Comodo Dragon with WebRTC Protect extension, IP/DNS Leakage detector, Comodo Web Inspector and AdBlock Plus.

Modem: Technicolor

First test: Locate me enabled, VPN client enabled, the DNS IP address of the computer's network card is set to automatic.

Result: Microsoft was able to locate me exactly where my house is located.

Second test: Same configuration as the first test but I changed the DNS IP address of the computer's network card to put the same DNS IP that was entered into the router and provided to me by NordVPN.

Result: Microsoft was able to locate me exactly where my house is located.

The goal was to remain anonymous even if the Locate Me feature is enabled.

I know that the Locate Me feature can be disabled. However, I have 2 questions:

What does Microsoft use to trace me so easily? Triangulation!?!? Hardware?!?!?

What can I do so the Locate Me feature can not locate me, even if the option is enabled?


Thank you.
 
WiFi triangulation...

Thank you so much!!! For people interested in keeping the location of their home WIFI anonymous, I just found out how to stop Microsoft and Google to triangulate my home WIFI in order to locate me. For Microsoft, you must add _optout to all of your SSIDs (2.4 and 5 GHz). For Google, you must add _nomap. If you wish to stop both of them, then add _optout_nomap to your SSIDs. So, if your SSID is Infantryman then it is going to be Infantryman_optout_nomap.
 
All your neighbors have to do that as well, otherwise it's moot...

"Locate Me" - keep in mind that even if you disable it for the GUI, it's still something that can be called by code - kind of worrisome...
 
All your neighbors have to do that as well, otherwise it's moot...

"Locate Me" - keep in mind that even if you disable it for the GUI, it's still something that can be called by code - kind of worrisome...
As per the last results on my tests, it doesn't track my location anymore with the Locate Me feature enable in Windows 10. It only gave me the location of last wifi hotspot (restaurant) I was logged on. So, it does work so far even if someone would call it by code.
 
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As per the last results on my tests, it doesn't track my location anymore with the Locate Me feature enable in Windows 10. It only gave me the location of last wifi hotspot (restaurant) I was logged on. So, it does work so far even if someone would call it by code.

One of the fun things with Windows based clients - having the appropriate technical skills and tools - I can discover every Access Point that windows machine has ever associated with.

By forcing a disassociate in 802.11, the client will then broadcast Probe Requests with every SSID it has attached to so it can get back to the AP it was just associated with - and that's useful information, as there are databases that have BSSID, SSID, and geographic information, and those databases are public.

Wigle is a one example... there are others...

https://wigle.net

Win10 Locate Me or not, it's pretty easy to locate someone...
 
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