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"but more often they just map an IP address range to some metadata" How did they acquire that metadata? This isn't a rhetorical question -- I am online with a
by endorphone 7y ago
"but more often they just map an IP address range to some metadata"
How did they acquire that metadata? This isn't a rhetorical question -- I am online with a provider that covers the entire country and services like MaxMind know my specific province/city (actually my little town just outside the city). I am unaware of any mechanism that the providers publish that declares specific locations -- or why they would even want to do that (the privacy implications are large, and it seems likely to be regulated) -- so how do these companies know?
Some providers, especially in Europe, cover multiple countries.
Traditionally it was by users running tools that would use either GPS coordinates or user-input and these geolocation providers would reverse engineer up a provider's tree. It is not a fundamental property of IPv4 and was not an intended use -- it just came about because there is commercial value is locating users. And now there's a massive perpetual data trawl monitoring massive amounts of data to keep it up to date from that nascent beginning.
And really it has always been a remarkable privacy intrusion that crept up and we simply accepted.
edit: I edited this a bit to more clearly convey that while providers clearly know the geolocation of every single IP, it's unclear how that data makes its way out.
- nine_k 7y agoProviders definitely have geographical maps of IP ranges; these are useful for customer support and network diagnostics and maintenance. Whether they sell this info is unknown to me. I suppose they legitimately could, given its being coarse.
- unilynx 7y agoMaxMind also sells a fraud prevention product, having access to a lot of transactions and their IP plus shipping address information probably helps to build a database like this
- toast0 7y agoA lot of providers include some geographic info in their reverse dns. My IP is currently mapped to X-X-X-X.tukw.qwest.net (ip redacted) which means I'm near Tukwila, WA. You can use that to put me in the Seattle metropolitan area which is usually close enough. Getting better accuracy than that means using other sources -- either data from the ISP, or from services that have IP and Geo information together and provide it somehow.
- endorphone 7y agoPossibly, but I'd wager that it doesn't play any part in this. Not only is it completely non-standard, using arbitrary divisions that often vary at completely different geographical levels, providers are woefully slow and inaccurate at actually updating it -- the few that still have such vestiges often publish completely inaccurate mappings (e.g. Bell Canada and Rogers both have this with their intermediary nodes, with descriptions that have no correlation with their actual locations). My provider -- a nationwide provider -- simply uses a no-additional-information IP quartet with a suffix as the DNS. Zero geographical information. Many others follow the same trend. And the nodes in between vary and change frequently as they update their infrastructure and pathways. I do remember when this whole exercise began and it started as a bunch of users running a desktop tool that would provide self-geolocation and publish it back. But...why? Why did we ever need this on the desktop and is it worth the privacy intrusion.
- jeltz 7y agoNo idea where they get their data because for my IP address they are totally wrong about the city while the whois data is correct.