Challenges in the military, environment, medical, industrial, home, traffic applications, and agriculture extend the scope of Wireless Sensor Networks. Data security over wireless networks is a challenge because of the presence of malicious and non-malicious users, whose purpose is to intercept communication or prevent the transmission of data by real users to perform data theft. To improve the location privacy in geographical routing, a hash-based location privacy-preserving scheme and fake source identification in grid-based geographical routing protocol in WSN are presented. In the SLPGR approach, SHA-256 hash encoding is implemented which hides the location information from attackers. The proposed fake source identification guarantees that the fake source and real source nodes are situated on different quadrants and have enough distance between them. The Findings indicate that the SLPGR model’s packet delivery ratio is further 278 % enhancement contrast to the tree-based diversionary routing, and more than 38 % compared to the CASER random walking system. The safety duration of the proposed method increases approx. 13% more than the tree-based diversionary routing and 11% more than CASER random walk routing. Energy consumption of the proposed method is lower by 3 times than the tree-based diversionary routing method, 1.4 times lower than CASER random walk routing. The comparative analysis of the SLPGR method shows 3 times lesser delivery miss ratio than tree-based devolutionary routing and 2.6 times lesser delivery miss ratio than CASER routing scheme.