Used a VPN to my home while in Mexico. Returned a week ago and all my devices (including those that have never been in Mexico) now show they're in Mexico. Google's IP correction form says it can take a month to fix.

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[–] 56 points 5 months ago (9 children)

Why does the browser go through all the trouble of sending out your language when Google is going to ignore it anyways?

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  • [–] [S] 26 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I believe Google specifically does this to discourage VPN use. It screws up their primary reason for existing: advertising revenue.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    So this is just Google punishing you?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

    Do you believe a multinational company's business polices are targeting you specifically each time you have a problem?

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Not always, but sounds like in this case it seems plausible

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 5 months ago

    Others report the same issue including someone commenting in this posting. From what I can tell Google is targeting private VPN servers on residential IPs.

    I've used a different private VPN running on a commercial cloud server when traveling internationally. Google has never fucked with the location of that IP.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I don't understand why a lot of websites go long ways into getting country from IP and then language from country instead of using directly the language reported by browser.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    A lot of Japanese websites I visit are the opposite. They look at my browser's language setting and display everything in "English" even though I'm clearly accessing from Japan.

    The problem is, their "English" sites are often machine-translated messes that I have to manually select the language. Even more annoying is when that language setting gets reset every time I click on a link.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    As much as I hate it, I'm 90% sure that they did some analysis (probably 10 years ago now) and found that there are enough people that don't properly configure their computer that IP location is actually a better indicator than the Accept-Language header.

    ...which of course perpetuates the problem.

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