[anyfactor]

I work for IPinfo, but this is my personal opinion/account.

Whenever I see people talking about their IP geolocation being wrong, I will reach out to them and try to fix that issue. Even if it is just one person, it really means a lot to them and to us as well.

For some IP geolocation correction, some providers are better than others, but with Google? oof, tough break.

It is really weird to see that the best possible chance of fixing your IP address with Google is to get a bunch of android smartphones and start running Google Maps with GPS on. Yes, that is even suggested to organizations with their own ASN (which represents a big IP address block) who are struggling with wrong IP geolocation assignment by Google. I have yet to come across any post about how people were able to contact Google, and they fixed their IP geolocation issues.

[LeifCarrotson]

> Whenever I see people talking about their IP geolocation being wrong, I will reach out to them and try to fix that issue. Even if it is just one person, it really means a lot to them and to us as well.

My IP geolocation is constantly wrong (I'm using TMobile home internet). It constantly says I'm in Detroit, or Chicago, or somewhere else potentially hours from where I live. I assume T-mobile is randomizing IP address allocation at everyone routed through some giant midwestern datacenter, and Detroit/Chicago simply have the most people, but I don't know and I don't care.

But I like it that way! I don't want random website owners to know exactly where I am. I've disabled location, camera, microphone, and notification requests in my Firefox settings, blocked popups, and installed an ad-blocker. I don't understand why anyone would do any of those things differently. I do prefer some location over global randomness that might not get the language or country right, and it's slightly annoying to constantly have to set the target store when shopping at, say, Menards, REI, or Napa Auto (even though I've been automatically logged in with the same shipping address for a decade, new visits to the pages default to location-based "my store" even when that data is unavailable)... but overall, I'd rather have a level of granularity that merely tells you I'm somewhere in the continental 48 US states.

Why does getting geolocation right mean a lot to you? Why should it mean a lot to me?

[anyfactor]

Solid question. There are a ton of reasons why accurate geolocation matters for everyone. For us it matters, because that is what we do as a business, we provide super accurate data.

> I don't want random website owners to know exactly where I am.

With IP geolocation, it is not exactly "exact" location. City level? Yes. Zip code level? Kinda Yes. Latitude and Longitude? I would put it as a good possible estimation. Our customers are aware of that.

Nobody is tracking you with IP geolocation, to be honest. It is used for a ton of reason.....and I just had a long day, please just read the blogs we have on our site. I wrote some of the blogs myself.

> Why should it mean a lot to me?

Honestly, if you are not being impacted by wrong IP geolocation, it may not mean a lot to you personally. But people who are impacted are being located to a wrong city, state or in some cases to a different country. Us providing accurate geolocation does mean a lot in my opinion. There are no hoops to jump through, we are literally reaching out to you to find a way to solve this problem.

[LeifCarrotson]

> It is used for a ton of reason.....and I just had a long day, please just read the blogs we have on our site. I wrote some of the blogs myself.

I scrolled through and found eg. https://ipinfo.io/blog/using-privacy-detection-data/ and https://ipinfo.io/blog/privacy-adtech-online-targeting/ and https://ipinfo.io/blog/governments-ip-address-data/, but while these might be useful to me as a business to filter the zip codes of targeted ads, they're exactly the opposite of something that provides value to me as a user.

Accurate geolocation might reduce the number of nuisance captchas I have to complete. You write "Our data is also used by governments around the globe because they know they can trust the insights we offer. Every day our databases are updated with the most accurate information at any given time..." but while your databases are the most accurate available, they're not 100% accurate, they're IMO conflating IP with identity and physical location and that just doesn't make sense.

[anyfactor]

Thank you. It is good to have these conversations. I appreciate you for taking a look. You are right, organizations should not conflate IP with identity on an absolute scale.

We are very open about the fact that, with IP geolocation, absolute real-time accuracy is not possible. There are billions of IP addresses and thousands of IP address owners who are shuffling them around randomly. Getting readily updated absolute accurate real-time data is damn near impossible at our scale. The most updated data you can get is on a daily basis, and we process around 1.3 billion requests per day.

The alternative you have to IP geolocation is GPS based geolocation. GPS has its place when used properly. IP geolocation is essentially a database. We are not getting any information from the user or their movement. We are largely inferring the data based on various publicly available datasets combined with an incredible amount of analysis.

The accuracy of our database on the city level is pretty close to 100%, but it is not 100%. This level of accuracy is acceptable to our customers. But you are right. There is a non-zero chance of error.

Now, customers who buy our product have to determine what is the significance of this of error rate. In most cases of IP geolocation, that is acceptable. Imagine traffic data at enterprise scale. Some of these organization are actively fighting cyberattacks on a minute to minute level. So, our data is very helpful for them. It is helpful in providing location context in data enrichment processes.

For advertisement and personalization, this low error rate could have significant impact. That is why we are having this conversation here, because some naively constructed personalization solution forces geolocation attributes on users.

But what we are seeing here is, GPS based location solutions, believing that they are so damn accurate whatever decision these organizations are making is not their fault, it is the user's fault somehow! Which is freaking absurd.

IP location's reasonable accuracy makes a strong case for privacy. There is no tracking involved for a user. For the regular organization with IP geolocation, they have just enough data on the user, and they are not asking the user to agree to a location tracking solution.

If organizations chose IP based location, they would be more lenient in providing easier fixes to personalization, because they are aware of the fact of non-zero chance of error rate. I am not trying to market the fact that not providing absolutely accurate data is a selling point somehow, but in fact I am trying to advocate for organizations to be more accepting and supportive of user requests. Most of the people I interact with about IP correction are not our customers or users of our customers. But we want to make sure they don't face these issues when they use our data or when they interact with someone who is using our data.

[richardjam73]

My ISP gives a new ip address every time the connection drops. I've given up using geolocation ip on websites as it is always off by 200 to over a 1000 Kilometres.

[greyface-]

If you have a peering relationship with Google, they'll give you access to their "ISP Portal", where you can provide a CSV of IP geolocation information for your address space.

[anyfactor]

> CSV of IP geolocation information

That is called a geofeed. If you own a large block of IP addresses, it is a good practice to have a geofeed data publicly available.

Our IP correction webpage is quite easily accessible for geofeed submissions [1]. You can email us, submit a link to a csv file or even a Google sheets page will work as well. Even though we appreciate geofeed submissions, it is not the most accurate or updated data source for IP geolocation, so we still have a lot of stuff to do to provide accurate data.

[1] https://ipinfo.io/corrections

[BonoboIO]

Could not use Sonarr, because they blocked Russian IPs via Cloudflare. I was confused, because I used a Hetzner Server from Germany. Maxminds DB that is used by Cloudflare flagged the /24 subnet as located in Moscow. I used the wrong data form an it was fixed in about 24 hours.

[ronsor]

I have my own ASN. Getting the geolocation information updated in the IPinfo database was extremely easy; however, months later Google still doesn't get it right for my IP ranges.

Kind of annoying, but I'm assuming Google doesn't even touch geofeeds.

[anyfactor]

Check this out: https://old.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/zm60vn/google_h...

We reached out to OP even though we were very sure that their IP geolocation is definitely correct with us. They checkmarked everything and then some. OP told us that we are providing accurate data.

But does Google care about that? Not really. Now they kinda have to use that android phone Google Maps trick and hope that it fixes their problem somehow.

[dicknuckle]

Is there an article you can point me to for fixing my geolocation? I route all of my home internet through a VPS so that I can bond (slightly different to load balance) 3 ISPs. I'll randomly have my geolocation show up very wrong.

I don't have and kind of wired internet here so this fixes the reliability of wireless internet where the old backup adage "2 is 1, 1 is none" comes into play.

[anyfactor]

I can only suggest our IP correction page: https://ipinfo.io/corrections

Submit your IPs, it will go through a verification process and if all checks out the data will be updated. Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution. You have to submit IP correction one by one to major IP geolocation providers.

[BonoboIO]

How did you bond 3 isps?