Surfshark: the first VPN to hide your GPS location

A VPN is increasingly important in an era where privacy shines through its absence. It is convenient to use it in countries that spy on their citizens, as well as in unsecured networks to ensure that nobody can spy on our traffic. Now, a VPN has taken a step further and hides our GPS location.

Surfshark: the first VPN that can hide your location

We talked about Surfshark, which has updated its VPN to add this new feature these days. Thus, a VPN not only offers the possibility of encrypting our traffic and simulating that our outgoing IP is another, but also allows us to choose the physical location that the applications or services detect from our device.

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Naomi Hodges, the company’s cybersecurity advisor, explained the reasons behind having decided to create this function. Among them, they find that most apps use the GPS location of users for various purposes, being mandatory even in some cases even though the user does not want to share it.

To determine the location of a user, web browsers first turn to the IP address, and we already know that it can be easily masked with the VPN. However, traditional VPNs cannot do anything against the location access permissions requested by mobile apps.

GPS Spoofing: prevents apps from knowing where you are

The location hiding technique is called GPS Spoofing , and many of you will know it for example because it is the one that was used massively when Pokemon Go was launched to the market, where, if we had the mobile with root, we could fool the location that I received the app and simulated that we were moving when we were actually inside the house.

What Surfshark does is overwrite the GPS coordinates of one of its servers to deceive the device. Thus, if we are connecting from Spain to a Surfshark server in the United Kingdom, the location that an application will receive will be that of that server in the United Kingdom, and not that of our mobile.

This VPN is also one of the few that Disney + can be seen from outside the United States, Canada or the Netherlands. Of course, the service is paid and does not offer any free version at present. The function of hiding the GPS location is available at no additional cost to users who already pay for the service.