Geolocation

Location is treated as a filter you opt into, not a fact the site assumes. With it granted, places can sort by distance, a map can show where you are, and the Proximity behaviour can tell you when you’re near something worth knowing about. Without it, everything still works — just without the “near you” lens.

The permission

Location follows the shared model described on the Reach overview: requested only on your gesture, asked by the browser’s own native prompt, granted to the device rather than to any account. A single combined dialog can cover location and notifications together, so enabling “nearby” is one clear choice rather than a trail of pop-ups.

Once granted, location resumes on a return visit without asking again. Revoke it in your browser or system settings and the site degrades quietly: the distance labels disappear, the sort returns to its editorial order, nothing breaks.

What it powers

Sorting is the baseline. A places overview sorts itself by distance and labels each place with how far away it is. One tap, and “nearby” becomes the order of the page.

Following is the same thing, continuously. A page that opts into tracking keeps re-sorting as you move — walk through a city and the list reorders itself around you. This uses a single shared position subscription no matter how many features are listening, and it works only while the page is open in the foreground; it stops the moment you leave.

Feeding behaviours. Every position fix is announced internally, and compositions like Proximity consume those announcements. The capability provides positions; what they mean is the behaviour’s job.

Because the content is already on the device — pages cached, coordinates in a small public feed — the location filter keeps working offline against your last-known position. The calculation is a distance formula running locally; no server is involved.

Privacy: your position never leaves the device

This is worth stating plainly. The platform ships coordinates to you (the public locations of published places); your own position is only ever compared against them on your device. No position is sent to a server, logged, or stored. The platform cannot know where you are — only your browser does, and only while you let it.

Where the operating system draws the line

A website asks the browser for a position; the browser asks the operating system; the operating system decides what it can actually deliver. That chain explains most of what can feel puzzling in practice:

• Phones outdoors are excellent. Real GPS, fast fixes, accurate to a few metres — the environment this capability is designed for.
• Desktops are approximate and sometimes blank. A laptop has no GPS; it estimates position from nearby Wi-Fi networks. Indoors with Wi-Fi off — or with location services disabled for the browser at system level — the OS may simply have no position to give. The site sees a quiet gap, not an error, and resumes automatically when a fix becomes available again.
• Foreground only. A web page receives positions only while it’s open and visible. Closing the app stops the flow — continuous background tracking is something the web platform deliberately does not offer, which is a privacy feature, not a missing one. Being told about things while the app is closed is the territory of server-sent push, covered under Notifications.

These are boundaries of the platform underneath, not settings to tweak. Anything built on location — including every behaviour on these pages — inherits them.