How Do Websites Decide 'Where I Live?' Can I Decide Instead?

[baumjwb]

Forgive me if this has been addressed elsewhere. I could not decide how to ask DDG without triggering more false positives than negatives.

I'm been a FTTN subscriber in Palo Alto for the last 4 years. Somehow the Home Depot in East Palo Alto, 2.5 miles away, is not the 'closest' store. No, it is one in Santa Clara which is >13 miles away. Somehow Home Depot's algorithms query my isp and locate it in Santa Clara. I inform their 'change your store' but it changes back each time I reboot. I believe I've seen this with other websites.

Is there a straightforward way to prevent Home Depot (and others) from 'deciding' they have a better way of 'knowing' where I live than I do? What is it that they use to 'decide?'

Thanks,
John

[mike.ely]

Unfortunately your best bet is with the vendors (Home Depot et all). My sense is that they're relying a bit too heavily on some form of GeoIP location in which your IP address is used to look up your geographical location. Even a big player in the game says their accuracy is only about 86% to within a 50-kilometer radius:
https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-faq/g ... databases/

The good news is that they'll get your country right 98% of the time?

It's a tough technical problem to solve. Were I to design a site to guess location I'd probably have it ask how accurate they are as it's both more customer-friendly and also a good way to track how accurate their GeoIP service is. Something like "Is the Santa Clara store your closest location?"

[geolocesloco]

Sonic (and most ISP's) hands out dynamic IP's from a large pool of addresses, so you might have an IP address living in Santa Rosa on one day, and the next day, a different customer living in San Francisco gets the address the next day. They can't keep track of these types of changes globally for every internet user every moment of the day.

They use databases compiled from many data sources, but for the most part go by Sonic's IP assignment, sometimes your search history, and covert data collected about your device/computer from various 3rd parties.

In short, there's not really anything you can do about this. Hopefully if you set your location on the site once, they'll set a cookie so that next time you return it goes by your location preference, and not their inaccurate guess.

[leifs]

There are extensions to some browsers that allow "faking" the geolocation. This can probably be used to set a fixed location for a (mostly) stationary computer.

Similar solutions exist for the OS level too. I've gone the other way, and blocked Ubuntu from reporting my location based on nearby wi-fi networks. It now only reports my IP, so sites have to make their best guesses.