[stevemclaugh]

Academic librarians, who negotiate terms with publishers, are obsessed with privacy and academic freedom. Bless 'em. In theory, publishers don't know who's downloading what. The librarians I've talked to say they delete their logs daily, if not several times a day.

As for geographic location, academics tend to travel a lot. Last I heard (from reading the court docs in Elsevier's lawsuit against Sci-Hub), they stopped using proxy connections a few years ago. They just log in using stored credentials, grab an auth token that lasts X minutes/hours, and download articles from whatever IP is convenient.