pHxaq 4 Posted ... Not sure if this is the right place to post but this is happening to me: I only used US servers (in Phoenix and Chicago). Recently I've been seeing ads in arabic while using my phone's browser (Chrome). I ignored it. Google's Gemini suddenly stopped working when I tried to use it by saying the service is blocked/not allowed on my country. Last week I've been notified by certain services I use that my logins were triggering alarms due to a "suspicious ip address"(never happened before), though they added that my activity was not unusual. And then, WhatsApp's AI answered me a question with a curious sentence: "if you're in Iran, you can...". I asked back why it said I was in Iran when I am not there, and it replied "Sorry, I got a wrong location signal that you were in Iran's capital". Ipleak shows I use airvpn servers and no DNS leaks either. This is all very weird, but Meta's AI answer shed a light on the possible problem. Just wanted to post it here in the forum so you guys are aware and maybe someone else saw the same behavior. Something's going on with the US servers, and it's worrying. I will switch to servers in other continent and see what happens (so far, the ads are completely normal and Gemini is working again after the switch). Regards. Quote Share this post Link to post
SurprisedItWorks 56 Posted ... Another data point. My daughter on the US west coast uses Air as her primary VPN but uses another firm for a much less used backup VPN. This week she found that on that backup VPN's San Francisco server, youtube addressed her as being in Tehran, a place with which she has never had a connection of any sort. My hypothesis was that some Tehran user on that server got the server's IP address associated with that location in some database. 1 pHxaq reacted to this Quote Share this post Link to post
Staff 10700 Posted ... Hello, thank you for the report. We checked all exit addresses, IPv4 and IPv6, of our Phoenix servers (Guniibuu, Khambalia, Sheratan) and Chicago servers (Fang, Kruger, Meridiana, Praecipua, Sadalsuud, Sneden, Superba): MaxMind GeoLite2, ipinfo.io and ip-api.com all place them correctly in Phoenix, Arizona and Chicago, Illinois, US. Google and Meta use their own location data for IP addresses, which can differ from those public databases, so they can place a shared exit address in another country even when the public databases are right. We cannot edit their data directly. Google offers a form to report a wrong IP location: https://support.google.com/websearch/workflow/9308722?hl=en Submit it while connected to the affected server; Google says updates can take more than a month. If it happens again, please post the server name and the exit IP shown by https://ipleak.net at that moment, so we can check that specific address. In the meantime, a server in another city or country is the practical workaround. Kind regards 1 pHxaq reacted to this Quote Share this post Link to post