• Perhyte@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Without a VPN every host you connect to can approximate your location down to a few miles.

    I just tried a few geo-IP lookups of my current IP address, and they all point to a location that (as the bird flies) is almost exactly 100 miles from my actual location. This is despite the ISP I’m using being headquartered in my current city, but maybe they have some infrastructure there?

    On mobile data I instead get a location 90 miles away, and if I look up the IP address of another machine I know the exact location of, the result is 60 miles off.

    60-100 miles is a pretty generous definition of “a few”.

    • Molecular0079@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think it depends. For my parents place, it literally points at the culdesac that their house is in. For my place, which is located in a relatively new community, it’s about 35 miles out.