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Sometimes bizarrely aggressively by the most unexpected companies, too. Taco Bell's website downright refuses to work if it catches a whiff of a VPN or any atte
by sli 6y ago
Sometimes bizarrely aggressively by the most unexpected companies, too. Taco Bell's website downright refuses to work if it catches a whiff of a VPN or any attempt at privacy. A VPN means 403 errors on everything and turning it off doesn't always stop them. There's some kind of token endpoint that will continue to 403 after disabling the VPN. Even the payment processor refuses to load unless you disable a bunch of privacy settings because it's inside an iframe. All it displays in Firefox is a Firefox error page saying the (payment processor's) site won't allow Firefox to display the page in an iframe.
You'd think I'm placing an order for tacos from Fort Knox or something.
- randerson 6y agoThey probably got thousands of chargebacks from sketchy users who logged in from proxies and VPNs, but very few legitimate orders.
- k_sze 6y agoIt’s also possible that it’s for tax compliance. When doing online commerce, it is sometimes required for the merchant to charge different tax rates depending on the location of the buyer, and then remit that tax to the corresponding government tax authority. For some countries, a reverse charge mechanism is possible, where the merchant puts the relevant tax info on the invoices and the buyer is supposed to pay the tax to their own tax authority directly. In any case, the IP address is an important piece of due-diligence evidence, which supports the merchant’s claim that the buyer is from a particular location. So if a merchant detects a VPN address, it’s not a good piece of location evidence, and so they refuse to do business outright.
- garaetjjte 6y agoDigital products might be tricky, but probably for physical products delivery address is used for tax purposes, so IP doesn't matter.
- mikelward 6y agoTrying to buy something online from the US for my Australian family members is nigh on impossible. The places that even allow entering a non-Australian billing address often decline my American credit card.