Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Yes, and you've made up a number that reinforces your point. A number that, if wrong, could negate your point.

Many more people are using VPNs these days. It's still not a large percentage, to be sure, but people are indeed doing it. Hell, I'm on my company VPN right now, and this site mis-identified my location because our VPN is set up to route most addresses in AWS's address space through the VPN (and ipdata.co appears to be hosted on AWS).

Then you have stuff like people on planes (usually this is all routed through a single PoP somewhere), people on mobile data who are roaming internationally (often proxied through one of the home carrier's PoPs), etc.

I think using IP geolocation is a decent first-order approximation, and is useful if there are no other ways to get that information, but it must always be treated as unreliable.




I agree that IP geolocation is a good approximation. It is never accurate up to street level.

Meanwhile, there is API to detect VPN, so that we can aware that the geolocation is good up to the server physical location.

https://www.ip2location.com/ip2proxy-web-service


Our API now supports detecting Tor nodes https://api.ipdata.co/103.10.197.50


We're working on creating our own offering on this. We'll have Tor Exit node detection first and are planning to make that generally available to all our users within the week at no extra cost.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: