Stop Facebook from announcing my current location to everyone!

March 20, 2015 1:38 AM

Facebook started automatically adding my current location to my posts. The location is guessed from my IP, I think, because I have nothing listed as my "current city" or "home town" or "other places lived" in my profile. I'm posting from my PC. It's freaking me out and I want to make it stop, but how?

I googled and the only suggestion seems to be "remove the location info from each individual post before you publish it". I can't remove the location from already published posts, because it doesn't show the "x" mark although the various online help pages say it should. I also can't seem to remove the location information before publishing a new post, I can only choose a new location. I tried setting my current city info in my profile to an imaginary location, but after I save it, the current city remains empty.

I want to find a permanent way to have no location info on my posts without jumping through hoops every time I post something. Can you help me?

posted by gakiko to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: In my experience, if you remove the location information when creating a post, your next post will not have location information attached by default. However, I'm not sure if this preference is saved if you log out of Facebook between posts, and it probably doesn't carry over between the site and the mobile app.

I've also found that the method for removing the location before you post is slightly different on different browsers. On Chrome (for OS X), it looks like the image in this help article. On Firefox (for OS X), it looks like this. To get to that point, I added the location, then I clicked the location icon again to edit it. Clicking the X to the right of "Mexico" removed the location. So you might try experimenting with different browsers.

For your previous posts, have you tried removing location information using the method described in the third answer here? That worked for me.
posted by neushoorn at 2:28 AM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Use Tor.
posted by Bangaioh at 3:04 AM on March 20, 2015

Spend $5-10 a month on a VPN service?
posted by COD at 5:03 AM on March 20, 2015

Best answer: Which browser do you use? It's possible that you've turned on "location sharing," which would pass that info to sites like Facebook. Turning it off will prevent this for future posts.

How to turn off location services in chrome and Firefox
posted by belladonna at 5:07 AM on March 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks! It turns out I did indeed have "location sharing" enabled, so I turned it off. And before that, I managed to delete my location from a post. I don't know which one helped (maybe both), but now I have location-less posts. Thank you!
posted by gakiko at 5:13 AM on March 20, 2015