Country from IP is usually based on public whois information about the IP range. No spyware involved. For city-level it gets more complicated. Every provider o

Country from IP is usually based on public whois information about the IP range. No spyware involved. For city-level it gets more complicated. Every provider of IP geo-localization has its own way of doing it. I guess google uses aggregated information from web searches to figure out the city/region for a given IP range... and sometimes it blatantly fails, because ISPs might allocate IPs in unexpected ways for their algorithms, or move them around to different cities/regions. I'm often getting geolocalized (by IP) to a totally different part of the country. I've seen similar behaviours in other countries and with other ISPs, so it's not something that can fail relatively easily. Then there might be another source of information, which is more spyware-like. Android devices (via the Google play services, I think) participate in constructing a database of cell tower IDs and WiFi access point MAC addresses along with their GPS-derived estimated geographic position (see more: https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/library/geolocation.googleapis.com https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/library/geolocation.go...). Apple has a similar service, too. Theoretically the could use the submitted information to geolocalize the source IP range, but I'm unsure whether they actually do it.