oakpatch's profile

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10 Messages

Tuesday, September 10th, 2024 10:49 PM

Geolocation craziness

The geolocation for all my devices on my home network is incorrectly showing Gardner, Massachusetts, which is about 3000 miles from where my home is actually located.  This problem cropped up last year, then seemed to solve itself, and has cropped up again a few months ago and is not going away.  One thing that would help me figure out what is going on would be to determine which geolocation database is at fault.  Most of the ones I checked via various websites do correctly show my location as being California.  Some of these are more accurate than others, but none of them are showing Massachusetts.  Then I finally found a clue from the website https://whatismyipaddress.com/location-feedback, which shows what four geolocation service providers are returning, and from there I saw that while some of the service providers are at least in the ballpark as far as location goes, the culprit that is returning Gardner, MA is W3C.  So now what?  Is there a way of getting this to return a correct location?

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26K Messages

2 months ago

Since that whatismyipaddress page states:

  • The W3C Geolocation service determines location by the browser providing GPS location (if available) and signal strengths of visible WiFi annoucements (sic)

the problem may be a browser or other device location setting.

Please be aware that there are 2 kinds of responses in this Forum: Replies and Comments. When you Comment on a post by scrolling down to "Comment on this post here...", I am notified of your response. But if you select Reply, I am NOT notified and may not be aware of your response.

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10 Messages

@BruceW​ that's possible, but I notice that the Windows lock screen, which shows local weather, shows it for Gardner, MA instead of correctly using my actual location, so I feel like it is probably more than just the browser.

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