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by TillE 854 days ago
Yeah Google aggressively uses geolocation throughout their services, regardless of your language settings. The flipside of that is that it's really easy to access the latest Gemini or whatever by just using a VPN.
1 comments

Wait, does that mean if I subscribe to Gemini Pro in country A where it's available (e.g. the US) but travel to Europe, I can't use it?

I'm really frustrated by Google's attitude of "we know better where you are than you do". People travel sometimes and that's not the same thing as moving!

I signed up for all of their AI products when I was in the US, some of them work while I'm out of country some don't. I can't tell what the rule is...
I really, really hate all of these geo heuristics. Sure, don't advertise services to people outside of your market, I get that. Do ask for a payment method from that country too to provide your market-specific pricing if you must.

But once I'm a paying customer, I want to use the thing I'm paying for from where I am without jumping through ridiculous hoops!

The worst variant of this I've seen is when you can neither use nor cancel the subscription from outside a supported market.

To be clear, I didn't pay for any of them. I just signed up for early access to every product that uses some form of ML that can remotely be called "AI"...

Once I got accepted, some of them work outside of the US and some don't