51–60 of 70 posts
25 years old and still constantly misused by tech companies to assume my language preferences while traveling even though my browser explicitly communicates my language and locale preferences. Spotify and Google are particularly notorious offenders.
25 years old and still constantly misused by tech companies to assume my language preferences while traveling even though my browser explicitly communicates my language and locale preferences. Spotify and Google are particularly notorious offenders.
God yes. It's still an uphill battle trying to convince my PC that I indeed want to have english-everything, although my PC is in europe. And boy do some websites go through hoops to be "clever"
That said: There's a reason I am going to google.com and not google.co.jp, fucking thanks fucking good day fucking fuck.
For 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…
Content control geo fencing is only recent, and streaming was there and will continue to be there long after IP geofencing stops being a practice. In fact, I believe if the technology wasn't around, streaming would have been accessible to more people.
Any amateur "carder" (what credit card thieves call themselves) knows that IP geolocation is in fact good for them, because they can easily load up a proxy or VPN, making this arbitrary, problematic (read: tracking) factor in their favour to steal money and commit identity fraud. There are easily accessible programs online that provide ZIP code accurate IP proxies.
I can go on and on about how terrible IP Geolocation is for almost everyone.
25 years old and still constantly misused by tech companies to assume my language preferences while traveling even though my browser explicitly communicates my language and locale preferences. Spotify and Google are particularly notorious offenders.
God yes. It's still an uphill battle trying to convince my PC that I indeed want to have english-everything, although my PC is in europe. And boy do some websites go through hoops to be "clever"
english + metric || gtfo
25 years old and still constantly misused by tech companies to assume my language preferences while traveling even though my browser explicitly communicates my language and locale preferences. Spotify and Google are particularly notorious offenders.
God yes. It's still an uphill battle trying to convince my PC that I indeed want to have english-everything, although my PC is in europe. And boy do some websites go through hoops to be "clever"
1. I'm in (east of) France geo
2. My system is set to en_GB
Yet some websites insist in putting me in Germany. Sometimes it even changes between requests (web pages), some are extra nutty and I even get mixed content within the same page.
For the love of all that is holy, please stop being clever. UAs have had Accept-Language headers ever since RFC3282. Use that hint.
And IP geolocation is still very relevant as of today. You can derive an enormous amount of geolocation data by looking at WHOIS data: https://ipapi.is/geolocation.html
For 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…
yaml says "NO"
What's with the `?ref=sanjayparekh.com` query parameter? It's present on every link, is that some new tracking standard?
And what a privacy nightmare, particularly with IPv6. When I see a map of my home IPv4, it's within a mile or two. With IPv6, it's on my block. But at least the companies I consult can block Chinese IP addresses from their public web presence. Chinese security will never think to stand up a server in the US or Europe. (Yes, I know it can help block noisy log generation).