Location in browsers defaults to city in another state

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My husband noticed something strange on a couple of websites on our computers today and I don’t know if it’s something I should be concerned about. Sorry if this isn’t the right place to post this question, but I couldn’t figure out a better area.

When we go to the Southwest Airlines website, it automatically populates the departure airport as Oklahoma City. We don’t live in Oklahoma City, or even in Oklahoma, and we haven’t traveled there. The American Airlines website does the same thing. Similarly, the Walgreens store locator site automatically brings up locations in Oklahoma City. We haven’t seen this before, or at least we haven’t noticed it.

My husband noticed this initially in Linux Mint 19.2 using Firefox, but I get the same result with every browser we have (Chrome, Chromium, Pale Moon, Slimjet) in every operating system (Windows 10, Windows 7, Linux Mint 19.2). Firefox is set to “Block new requests asking to access your location.” Chrome and Chromium browsers are set to “Ask before accessing” location, and we haven’t granted access. We use UBlock origin on all browsers and computers and Privacy Badger on some.

What would make these sites/browsers default to Oklahoma City? Is it connected with some setting in our AT&T modem/router? We did get a new modem/router around the beginning of October when we switched to fiber. When I look up our public IP address on whatismyipaddress.com, it shows the location as our city, not Oklahoma City.

I’ve tried to find out something by searching online but I don’t know enough to ask a sensible search question, and everything I’ve read so far is either not relevant to this situation or beyond my meager technical understanding or both.

Is this something I should be concerned about?

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When I do a search on Google and scroll to the bottom of the results page, I see a statement that tells me where I am based on my internet address. Sometimes the location is correct right down to my neighborhood. Other times it’s off by as much as almost 200 miles. I can’t prove what’s going on but I think the key is the part of the above statement “based on my internet address”. My ISP will from time to time change my IP address, apparently to an address that corresponds to quite a different geographic location. I’ve noticed this on both Win 7 and Mint 19.2 with Opera which is a Chrome based browser. I haven’t checked with any other operating system or browser.

Maybe something similar or analogous is happening to you.

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jburk07

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IP only give approximated locations. It’s possible the location is being picked up from your ISP’s address, rather than yours. If you use a VPN, then all bets are off!

the given location is an approximation provided by public databases

From: What is my IP? Find out your IP address and location!

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jburk07, doriel

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Yes it depends on ISP mostly. We have Deutsche Telekom. Thats why for example my def location is in Germany, although I sit in Czechia. Its ISP/WAN related where your location is shown.

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Kirsty, jburk07

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It’s not a setting in the browser, and short of using a proxy or VPN, you can’t change it, though you may be able to disconnect the internet and get a different IP next time. That place where it thinks you are is where your internet provider’s point of presence is for that connection.

There’s nothing wrong… it’s fairly common for this to happen. When I first moved to my new house years ago, I had internet service that had my location as 700 miles from where it actually was (consistently). When I sent a request for a web page, as far as I know, it first went to the point of presence 700 miles away, and that was where the packet left the ISP’s control and joined the backbone, on its way to its destination. As far as the broader network was concerned, that point it joined the backbone IS where I was, logically speaking. My IP address reflected that location, and as long as the backbone providers got the packet to that point, it was “job complete” as far as they were concerned. The rest of it was up to the ISP.

Rather than be annoyed by the inaccurate geolocation, I think of it as a security and privacy feature. It’s harder to use the IP as a part of a fingerprint to establish your location if that location varies wildly from day to day or week to week. If it was always pointing to your actual location, that would tend to corroborate for them any information they may have taken about your home or work address. If it was always 700 miles away, it wouldn’t confirm your physical addresses in the short term, but in the long term, a location that is relatively constant, even if 700 miles away, still helps establish a persistent ID over time. For privacy, I think the best bet is for your IP/PoP to bounce around all over the place, and for the total coverage area (the pool of locations it can pick for you) to be as big and to cover as many people as possible.

The more potential non-you people within the coverage area of your ISP, the less useful it is to the data slurpers. Your ISP is always going to be known to the would-be fingerprinters, and that’s unavoidable (unless you use a VPN). If the location consistently points to a small town with a small population of people with that ISP, that’s a small pool of people you could be when you show up with that IP address. But if your IP is from a large area with many tens or hundreds of thousands of people with that ISP, it’s much harder to figure out which one you are if the other data are limited.

 

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Steve, Charlie, jburk07, doriel, DriftyDonN

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Is this something I should be concerned about?

No you are safe, that is regular behavior. Its “inaccurate by design” and there is nothing to worry about (no extra payments for internet connection for example). It will work just fine.
HTH.

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jburk07

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Thanks, everyone, for your reassuring information. I’m not sure that I understand all of the details, but it does seem as if I don’t have a real cause for concern.

I was mostly concerned because sites like whatsmyipaddress and the vpnoverview site linked in Kirsty’s response *do* identify my actual city as my location, so this Oklahoma City thing didn’t appear to be coming from my IP address. I don’t use a vpn.

Another thing I don’t quite understand is that the websites that default to the Oklahoma City location consistently show that one location rather than changing to different locations at different times. When I look at the modem/router interface, all of our devices show as using dhcp, so I thought that meant that the IP address would change occasionally, but that doesn’t appear to be happening.

So I still don’t completely understand, but as long as it’s not a security problem, I will just accept it and hope it’s possibly a good thing.

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[LHiggins]

Just wanted to add that I have a somewhat similar situation with my IP address. I use a Sprint hotspot for my internet connection, as we are in an area on the east coast that has no other service. I consistently am assigned an IP address by Sprint/T-Mobile that is usually in Chicago, and even as far west as Colorado. So I get that website “population” thing for some sites as well. It especially happens with large store websites – they always try to “assign” me to a local store that is hundreds, if not a thousand miles from where I actually am.

I began keeping track of the IP address when my email server started rejecting sending emails saying that I was using a Spammer’s IP address. Apparently T-Mobile/Sprint have a somewhat finite number of IP address and the reassign one each time you log on – and sometimes those are bad IPs and are listed in something called Spamhaus Blocklist and flagged, so my email won’t work. Each time, I have to disconnect and reconnect to hopefully get a “clean” address.

But as far as the location of the IP – it has never been anywhere close to where I actually am.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by LHiggins.

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jburk07, Kirsty

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@lhiggins,
Man, that sounds like a real pain, sorry. At least we don’t have problems like that.

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Seems like really unpleasant situation you have. Im thinking how to get rid of this issue, when server has some malicious IPs in its pool. I will try to post solution here, if we come up with something.
the reeboot-free solution is run cmd as admin and type
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew

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jburk07 wrote:

Firefox is set to “Block new requests asking to access your location.” Chrome and Chromium browsers are set to “Ask before accessing” location, and we haven’t granted access.

But you want your correct location to be discovered by websites?

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[jburk07]

@b,
Oh no, I don’t want my real location to be displayed. I just was trying to understand why it said Oklahoma City when the IP address location is NOT Oklahoma city (unlike some of the other posts in this thread). The IP address location is our actual city. That’s why I couldn’t figure out how Oklahoma City came into it.

I’d be happy if those websites just showed a blank location (as many do) instead of automatically filling in OKC.

I guess really I was just concerned that there might be something else going on, I don’t know, some bad actor using our connection or something!

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• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by jburk07.

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b

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LHiggins wrote:

Apparently T-Mobile/Sprint have a somewhat finite number of IP address

World’s IPv4 IP addresses has long been exhausted and the move to IPv6 is slow so ISPs are re-using IP addresses.

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LHiggins

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Thanks! Yes – reusing apparently “tainted” addresses as well. I report the ones that don’t work, and just reboot to get a different one. Of late it has been better, but it is quite frustrating when it does happen and I get that rejected message!

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Xfinity changed my IP so I moved from California to Kansas as far as the web (Google for sure) was concerned. It took about a month for that to sort itself out.

IP Location Lookup – Check Location of Your Public IP – IPLocation.io

🔍 IP Address Lookup – Find IP Address Location – WhatIsMyIP.com

What Is My IP Address (IPv4 & IPv6) & Location? | NordVPN

Your IP Address’s GeoIP2 Data | MaxMind 

Trace My IP | IP Address Tracker | IP Tracer | Computer Hardware IP Visitor Location

 

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@rebop2020,
Thanks for the links, and I can imagine it would be a pain for your IP address to switch to a different state.

But again, my issue doesn’t really seem to be the IP address, or at least not directly. All those sites you linked show my IP address in the correct state and the correct city, or sometimes an AT&T server in Redmond, WA. I just don’t know where the Oklahoma City is coming from.

In order for websites like the ones you listed to see my IP address, I have to turn off UBlock Origin, except for tracemyip.org, which sees it even when UBlock Origin is turned on. So I’m beginning to wonder if Oklahoma City is some kind of default inserted by UBlock Origin, or by websites like the airline sites when they can’t determine an IP address.

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Ascaris ( #2318399 ) “For privacy, I think the best bet is for your IP/PoP to bounce around all over the place, and for the total coverage area (the pool of locations it can pick for you) to be as big and to cover as many people as possible.”

Is this something the user can get the ISP to do and, if so, how?

I entirely agree that having one’s location reported incorrectly is a most convenient and a big plus benefit from the point of view one’s privacy and cyber security. If some necessary communication is to be received from, let us say the government’s internal revenue service or a social security agency, that is made through letters mailed or emailed to the address that those organizations have already on their records. By the same token, it does not matter whether parties that have no reason that is any of one’s concern for knowing where one is, do not know correctly one’s real location. One exception could be when using maps to find a way to go from A to B; that could be a problem, o not, depending on the mapping application one uses.

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Steve

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? says:

blame it on Maxmind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxMind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_geolocation

https://lifehacker.com/why-does-my-ip-address-come-from-a-different-state-1829552450

https://www.centurylink.com/home/help/internet/static-ip-addresses/my-ip-address-shows-the-wrong-location.html

i’ll meet you somewhere in Kansas:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B000’00.0%22N+97%C2%B000’00.0%22W/@38,-97.558114,9z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d38!4d-97

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jburk07

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[Geo]

Firefox has an add on called  “Location Guard”   that might work.  Find your town Latitude and longitude online and put it in.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Geo.

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jburk07

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? says:

and:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/disable-fake-location-firefox-internet-explorer-chrome/

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jburk07

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Just had my first experience with this, Google search thinks I’m in Los Angeles county, California, when I’m really in southeastern Ohio.

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I believe if you enable location tracking for a website in your browser it is then possible for it to use HTML Geolocation, which can narrow down your location to your local neighborhood or street.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/html-geolocation/

“GEO-location in HTML5 is used to share the location with some websites and be aware of the exact location. It is mainly used for local businesses, restaurants, or showing locations on the map. It uses JavaScript to give latitude and longitude to the backend server. Most of the browsers support Geolocation API.”

https://www.w3.org/TR/geolocation/

“The Geolocation API defines a high-level interface to location information associated only with the device hosting the implementation. Common sources of location information include Global Positioning System (GPS) and location inferred from network signals such as IP address, RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses, and GSM/CDMA cell IDs, as well as user input. The API itself is agnostic of the underlying location information sources, and no guarantee is given that the API returns the device’s actual location.”

How does the Geolocation API detect my location?

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geolocation/overview

“The Geolocation API returns a location and accuracy radius based on information about cell towers and WiFi nodes that the mobile client can detect.”

It seems that the default would be to just use the less accurate location based on your current public IP address.

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Moonbear wrote:

Just had my first experience with this, Google search thinks I’m in Los Angeles county, California, when I’m really in southeastern Ohio.

You can quickly find out what your public IP address is and where it’s located with this quick and simple web page:

https://whatismyipaddress.com/

It instantly shows your current IP address, ISP, city, region, and country. Click “show complete details” link for additional info. This info is available to any web server that you connect with.

They also have an “update my IP location” link, which I have never used so not sure exactly how that works.

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The weirdest part of all of this for me was that that only things showing my location as Los Angeles were Google related.

It went back to showing my location as being in Ohio on Google search a couple hours after my other post.

 

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