5 ms·

To me the most infuriating practice is that if you don't enable your location when you open google maps they will passive aggressively position your view at the

by mateo1 5y ago

To me the most infuriating practice is that if you don't enable your location when you open google maps they will passive aggressively position your view at the most inconvenient place possibly, some times in the middle of the atlantic, as if they can't tell which city you are in.

Nasrudith 5y ago
Personally I consider that an odd form of "politeness". It is 'creepy' when you buy a large ticket item and ad networks try to seranade you with a demand you already fuffilled. They can geolocate by IP but instead choose to "look away". I guess they do that because those who aren't familiar with it would be freaked out at how close it got. Geo-IP is mostly just hilarious to me from how they get it off like when loging in to gmail in Pennsylvania saying there was a login attempt from Washington DC. It shows some respect that you don't want focus on your actual geography but I also do stuff like look at real life places to see how well it matched with my initial imagination.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Ah, yeah. My US ISP had apparently bought a block of IPv4s from a Canadian ISP. aI kept getting redirected to Canadian checkout paths, French language pages, etc, for quite some time.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    The large Canadian Telcos (until maybe in the near future) are actually regulated quite heavily to provide sub-services at competitive rates to competitors along their vertical integration. So you can spin up an ISP in Canada, buy capacity off Telus, and provide a decently priced competing product assuming you can undercut their overhead & admin costs.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Except for IP, which IME is usually ludicrously inaccurate for mobile networks (AT&T’s Sacramento network used to show up, IIRC, as being somewhere in the South Bay in IP-based lookups), doesn't disabling location services disable exactly the facilities they would use to determine what city you are in?

by mateo1 5y ago

Nasrudith 5y ago

Personally I consider that an odd form of "politeness". It is 'creepy' when you buy a large ticket item and ad networks try to seranade you with a demand you already fuffilled. They can geolocate by IP but instead choose to "look away". I guess they do that because those who aren't familiar with it would be freaked out at how close it got. Geo-IP is mostly just hilarious to me from how they get it off like when loging in to gmail in Pennsylvania saying there was a login attempt from Washington DC. It shows some respect that you don't want focus on your actual geography but I also do stuff like look at real life places to see how well it matched with my initial imagination.

tyingq 5y ago
Ah, yeah. My US ISP had apparently bought a block of IPv4s from a Canadian ISP. aI kept getting redirected to Canadian checkout paths, French language pages, etc, for quite some time.
- munk-a 5y ago
  The large Canadian Telcos (until maybe in the near future) are actually regulated quite heavily to provide sub-services at competitive rates to competitors along their vertical integration. So you can spin up an ISP in Canada, buy capacity off Telus, and provide a decently priced competing product assuming you can undercut their overhead & admin costs.

dragonwriter 5y ago

Except for IP, which IME is usually ludicrously inaccurate for mobile networks (AT&T’s Sacramento network used to show up, IIRC, as being somewhere in the South Bay in IP-based lookups), doesn't disabling location services disable exactly the facilities they would use to determine what city you are in?