Google Chrome welcomes a new addition to its browser extensions, Vytal, the new VPN tool.
Installing Vytal as a virtual private network (VPN) extension in the Chrome browser will allow users to have privacy control over their location.
The primary goal of a VPN is to conceal and protect users from revealing their activities while online. Even though VPNs are most commonly used to protect against hackers and snoops on public networks, users may also use them to conceal their IP address, browsing activity, and personal data while using any Wi-Fi network.
A VPN is also commonly used by many to avoid certain sorts of online tracking and to stream specific types of content that are not available in their current location or country just yet.
Vytal Chrome Extension
On Y Combinator's Hacker News, the developer who goes by the alias 'z0ccc' revealed the newly released Vytal Google Chrome extension and asked readers for feedback on the functioning of the application.
Vytal has the capability to impersonate users in terms of their timezone, locale, geolocation, and user agent. According to Google Chrome, "This data can be used to track you or reveal your location."
The vast majority of browser extensions that offer protection against fingerprinting rely on content scripts to inject script tags into online pages.
Chrome added, "There are many limitations to script tag injections, which you can read about here:https://palant.info/2020/12/10/how-anti-fingerprinting-extensions-tend-to-make-fingerprinting-easier/."
In order to falsify this data, Vytal makes use of the chrome.debugger API. Because of this, it is possible to spoof the data in frames, web workers, and while a website is loaded for the first time. In addition to this, it renders the spoofing entirely untraceable.
Using Vytal as a VPN
After installing Vytal as an extension, users will have the option to either select their location from a selection of pre-populated locales, alter the data to match their IP address, or create a custom location.
As reported by BleepingComputer, the extension does not provide 100% accuracy instantaneously. It may allow incorrect information about users to be displayed during the loading process of a webpage initially.
There is a brief pause between the loading of the pages and the point at which the data-spoofing debugger begins its work, and accurate information about a user can be collected while the webpage is still in the process of loading.
However, despite the fact that the faked data is not displayed on the initial load, the script performs an excellent job of concealing location information that may be uncovered by using JavaScript APIs.
This extension ought to function on all Chromium-based browsers, including the Brave Browser. However, it cannot be extended to Mozilla Firefox because that browser does not support the debugger Application Programming Interface (API).
The developer, z0ccc, stated to BleepingComputer that the extension was initially developed to prevent their location data from being exposed when utilizing a VPN and to prevent another project of theirs, called LocateJS, from detecting location metadata.
z0cc stated that additional features for the extension will be revealed soon. These additional features are also intended to make the extension simpler to use and include a permitted list of websites that users frequently visit that will not have their data spoofed.
