HACKER Q&A
📣 margal

How do Google/Facebook/Twitter/Netflix/Spotify determine my location?


I'm using my corporate gateway to access the web and our servers are located in Finland. A month ago, Google started to think I'm from Russia so suddenly my search results are in Russian. I've tried to submit to google that there are getting it wrong, no answer. I've searched the web, it seems like this is something a lot of people are experiencing and even they didn't got a response from google about it. I've tried to sample my IP in different services like IP2Location and MaxMind, all giving me the current location in Finland. I know I can specifically tell google my location but now I'm really trying to find out how each company determines my location. Any one knows?

  👤 uniqueuid Accepted Answer ✓
There's actually a lot more than geoip.

- GPS

- Proximity of known wifi names (Google has/had a database on that)

- Proximity of known devices

- Bluetooth beacons

In practice, if there is even one device sharing the same IP (on NAT) or a known subnet (in companies) and that device leaks location (i.e. by entering your address or allowing GPS access), then you're pinpointed.

👤 ceph_
You can change what DNS resolver you use. Google used to do their own geoip location database by measuring average latency of users on /24 of resolver addresses. (Not the anycast resolver address, the actual dns server you hit.)

There's also always google.com/ncr for no country redirect

👤 calgoo
I have also seen it happen based on a lot of users logging in from 1 location (and changing the google defaults for them). So our Corp gateway in Amsterdam has shown me defaults in Italian, German, and Dutch. Not sure if its actually true, but thats what I was told at the time (dont have any references to it, was an internal talk with our network provider at the time).
👤 Froedlich
It hasn't happened in a few years, but Google used to periodically decide I was in Australia instead of the central USA. I often got much more relevant search results as a faux Australian, so I tried connecting to google.com.au, which steadfastly redirected me to google.com in the USA...