IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
sanjayparekh.com
IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
1–10 of 70 posts
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#2Very cool read! I wasn’t working during your time, but I recently have been working on maxmind db datasets.
How different was it to what was offered in the past?
I used to think this data was sourced from ISPs and could not be deduced from how you mentioned in your post
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#3[deleted]
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#4"That comment of "crushing us" was infuriating. We decided to go it alone, and the results show this was the right decision."
Very satisfying to read!
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#5It's extremely {whatever}-centric to assume that IP location in any way implies anything about one's preferred language. There are multi-lingual countries. There are cultural minorities. People travel. (Not to mention VPNs becoming more popular these days.)
So I always found it infuriating that web sites would try to guess my language from geoip when my browser already sends Accept-Language headers. They spend resources doing this stuff, think they're doing their users a service, give themselves a pat on the back, and then unnecessarily screws up the UX for a significant portion of the users.
I have no idea why companies keep doing this.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#6For the last 25 years I’ve hated this invention because it has been continually conflated to make the assumption that my preferred language is based on the country I currently find myself.
Every major global tech company has made this mistake and nearly all of them deliberately override my Accept-Language request header and ignore it.
Did you know that over 8 million people worldwide are native speakers of Catalan, whilst only 4 million people speak Norwegian? Guess which speakers are continually ignored.
When I travel to France, should websites push me to use the website in French, even though I don’t speak it? No.
Incorrect understanding of the problem and badly misused over time. I’d vote to have the IP2Location databases killed off and buried for good.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#7For the last 25 years I’ve hated this invention because it has been continually conflated to make the assumption that my preferred language is based on the country I currently find myself. Every major global tech company has made this mistake and nearly all of them deliberately override my Accept-Language request header and ignore it. Did you know that over 8 million people worldwide are native speakers of Catalan, w…
You're confusing the tech/innovation with the uses. I agree with you that not respecting, or rather assuming, a user's preferences is a bad UX mistake. That said the tech is also used for content control without which streaming of shows and films would be impossible to contractually happen. It is used to protect your bank account. It is used in a myriad of ways that are much less visible than just picking a language or showing targeted advertising.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#8It's extremely {whatever}-centric to assume that IP location in any way implies anything about one's preferred language. There are multi-lingual countries. There are cultural minorities. People travel. (Not to mention VPNs becoming more popular these days.) So I always found it infuriating that web sites would try to guess my language from geoip when my browser already sends Accept-Language headers. They spend resour…
See my comment about this on another response.
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#9"That comment of "crushing us" was infuriating. We decided to go it alone, and the results show this was the right decision." Very satisfying to read!
It was very satisfying to live through and now reflect back on. :-)
Re: IP Geolocation Is Twenty-Five Years Old
#10Very cool read! I wasn’t working during your time, but I recently have been working on maxmind db datasets. How different was it to what was offered in the past? I used to think this data was sourced from ISPs and could not be deduced from how you mentioned in your post
This is a great question. So when I came up with IP location back in 1999, there was nothing for location-based targeting. Any advertising that happened would be because a user shared a location (ZIP code, etc.) and then got cookie'd and that information was brokered between sites. This obviously doesn't work for more secure uses (content control, fraud detection, etc.), so some of these uses were made possible once we launched. The shift to streaming content would never have happened without a secure way to accurately know a user's location.
The other part of your question, I think, deserves its own blog post. One of my tenants was to NEVER be reliant on someone else's willingness to give us data or access. So, everything was designed with the idea that we would have to gather first-hand data and knowledge. If an ISP gave us data, that would be great and make things easier. But being beholden to ISPs would mean we would be hosed if the sands shifted. This is why I am still flabbergasted when people build their entire company based on someone else's platform, API, etc., and then are upset when those platforms change their models. If you build the foundation of your company on someone else's land, be prepared to lose the house.