[donavanm]

> I never understood the need for geoip unless you ship spyware.

There are many many cases where it’s relevant. Others have mentioned prepopulating or ease of use aspects. But you’re making big assumptions that the client has an interactive user at all. It’s important where you don’t own the client or there is defined behavior, say at a protocol behavior, that must be respected. Moving earlier than that there are cases where you need to route traffic before any sort of connection is even established.

I suspect you’re also underestimating geolocation precision and accuracy. Free datasets will get you the right state or city say 90-95% of the time. Cheap datasets get you to the right town or post code 95-97% of the time. Expensive or bespoke multi source datasets will get you reasonable post code, neighborhood, or even household & address accuracy. Think of cross correlating order histories per physical address, device fingerprints, and IP addresses/triangulation.