What is my elevation?
Most visitors will see nothing here even after allowing location, and that is expected. Altitude only arrives from a real GPS fix, so a phone outdoors may report it and a desktop almost never will. When it does arrive, treat it loosely: vertical accuracy from GPS is markedly worse than horizontal.
Your browser will ask before sharing anything. Nothing is uploaded.
Your current elevation, your height above sea level, can be shown above once you allow location access. When you consent, your browser's Geolocation API returns an altitude value alongside your coordinates, where your device's GPS hardware provides one.
Altitude from consumer GPS is the least reliable part of a location fix. Horizontal position (latitude and longitude) is usually accurate to a few metres, but vertical altitude can be off by tens of metres, and many devices, especially laptops and desktops without a real GPS chip, return no altitude at all.
If nothing appears above after you allow location, your device simply did not supply an altitude. That is common on Wi-Fi-positioned machines. Phones outdoors with a clear sky view give the best readings.
How a website reads this
This is the exact call a page makes. Nothing else is involved, and nothing is sent anywhere: the value is read in your browser and displayed to you.
position.coords.altitude from getCurrentPositionMetres above the WGS 84 reference ellipsoid, or null. Null is the usual answer on a laptop, because altitude comes from GPS and wifi positioning does not produce one. Where a value does arrive it is the least accurate of the three coordinates.
- Needs your permission
- Yes, your browser asks first
- Can it be faked
- Yes. Follows the location override, like every other coordinate field.
- Contribution to a fingerprint
- Not counted. Not part of the fingerprint estimate: consent-gated and usually null. How we estimate this.
What you should know
Why sites collect it
Elevation matters to hiking, cycling and aviation apps, weather and air-pressure tools, and mapping that needs a third dimension. Most everyday sites never request it.
Privacy implications
Elevation is derived from the same consented location fix as your coordinates, so it carries the same sensitivity, gated behind a permission prompt and never uploaded by this page. On its own an altitude figure is not very identifying.
How to change or hide it
Deny the location prompt to skip it, or revoke access afterwards. There is no separate altitude permission; it comes with location. Accuracy depends on your hardware, so treat the number as approximate.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my elevation blank or zero?
Your device did not report an altitude. That is normal on laptops and desktops positioned by Wi-Fi. A phone outdoors with GPS gives the best chance of a reading.
How accurate is browser elevation?
Less accurate than horizontal position. Consumer GPS altitude can be off by tens of metres, so use it as a rough guide, not a survey measurement.
Sources
Browser behaviour changes and vendors cap these values differently, so the claims above that are not self-evident are checked against the specifications and vendor documentation below.
Last checked on . How these values are measured and estimated is set out on the methodology page.
Something wrong here? Tell us what your browser reports and it gets corrected.