Mozilla Firefox thinks I'm in South Korea, Google Chrome thinks New Zealand

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quickymart

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#3247076 10-Jun-2024 19:00

lxsw20:

I would say there is some sort of VPN extension installed in Firefox.

Assuming I'm looking in the right place, this appears to be the only one I have installed:

Xile

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#3247436 11-Jun-2024 13:06

Interesting. The other day my computer had a pop up saying something along the lines of a timezone change detected suggesting I was in South Korea. I could either accept or ignore the change. I ignored it. Using Firefox with Skinny broadband.

quickymart

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#3247635 11-Jun-2024 19:21

And after having the router and desktop off for most of the day, tonight Firefox thinks I'm in Arrowtown(!). While that would be lovely at this time of year, it's not accurate...but I guess at least it got the country correct this time 😀

freitasm

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#3247682 11-Jun-2024 21:50

IP addresses are assigned to the ISP address. IP addresses are not assigned to an specific address or lat/lon coordinates.

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quickymart

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#3247688 11-Jun-2024 22:08

Ah well, thought someone might find it amusing. As you were 🙂

yitz

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#3247693 11-Jun-2024 22:30

Google Maps is pretty accurate and in my experience seems to map IP addresses down to a few hundred metres.

It's always mildly amusing when you browse Maps after picking up a dynamically allocated IP address and it's zoomed into the town/city of the last allocated user.

Another one to remember is that Levin is the centre of New Zealand.

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#3247697 11-Jun-2024 23:21

yitz:

Google Maps is pretty accurate and in my experience seems to map IP addresses down to a few hundred metres.

It's always mildly amusing when you browse Maps after picking up a dynamically allocated IP address and it's zoomed into the town/city of the last allocated user.

Another one to remember is that Levin is the centre of New Zealand.

Google Maps works a bit differently. When you travel around, your phone uses GPS to collect all the access points it can see and feed them to Google (the iPhone does the same).

Using Google Maps on your phone combines data from GPS (slow to start), cell site locations and any access points near you based on that information collected by millions of phones worldwide. It is pretty accurate.

However, Google Maps on the browser uses information from your access point and any others nearby to determine your location, even without a GPS or cell site.

That's why if you live in Napier and get a second-hand router from someone in Wellington, Google Maps on your computer will show Wellington for the first few days.

This is different from the IP address location. It uses a database, usually updated once a month, with IP addresses, cities and countries. This is how I calculate this one (IPv4 only): Geekzone User IP information or this one Proxy & VPN detection API - IPHub.info.

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#3247702 12-Jun-2024 00:20

Mapping user location down to suburb level like Google does for IP addresses (via Google Maps collected data) would definitely not be able to re-sold due to being personally identifiable information - that's a major limitation of third party IP geo-location databases.

I should note the dynamic IP-to-location mapping thing only presents if you're not signed in.

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