Many users overlook this detail, but changing your IP address with a VPN service or a proxy server is not always enough to improve privacy. The browser itself has geolocation and timezone values that can be read and used to block access to a service, or determine your real location. The Vytal extension compatible with Chrome uses the browser's debugging system to change the location, user agent, and timezone in a couple of clicks.
Our previous article about the PrivacyTests portal helps us understand how much information a browser can expose in a normal session. Some developers work to improve that situation, and others seem to ignore it entirely, but we must also mention extensions. Many of them use scripts to interfere with the formation of “fingerprints”, however, sometimes they have the opposite effect.
This is where Vytal, a Chrome-compatible extension comes in. What exactly does it do? In essence, Vytal allows the user to perform a spoof of the location, timezone, and user agent in the browser. The difference is that Vytal uses Chrome's debugging API for its spoofing, making it undetectable (in theory).
Vytal: Extension to Change a Browser's Geographic Location
The first thing we should understand about Vytal is that it is not a VPN or a proxy: it never attempts to modify your current IP address. The idea is to alter the data to avoid a conflict between the location of the IP address and the location reported by the browser. This can be very useful among VPN service users trying to access a site with geo-blocking.
Vytal enables a total of six fields: Profile, where we can choose the city manually, match the IP region, or enter a custom value; Timezone, based on the tz table; the values of Location, Latitude, Longitude, and User Agent, with an option to change all values randomly at a specific interval (the factory setting is 60 minutes). If we click the arrow (up and to the right), it will take us to a general Vytal report, which informs whether any detector has recognized the modified information or not.
Vytal is a free and open source extension, but it has some limitations. The most important of all is that it adds a bar under the web address, reporting on browser debugging. This can be hidden using the --silent-debugger-extension-api modifier in one of Chrome's shortcuts. Finally, Vytal has no Firefox compatibility because the browser does not support a debugging API for extensions, although that could change in the future.
Download the extension: Click here
