So I have always been typing in maps.google.com and it has always been showing me the “exact” location of my home where my router in Canada is located.
Recently, in a mini heart attach situation, when I opened maps.google.com, I i found zoomed out map of India. Also, when I do a google search the “Region” is set to India, although the “location” is correct, as in what I expect to be exactly from Canada.
whatismyip is still okay with IP Address location country and city. And when I type “buy bikes near me” it still shows my home location. Bing shows local weather as local to my place in Canada.
Only “google region” and maps.google.com are “India”. This behavior persists even if I change laptop. I am using LAN always with wifis disabled.
In my opinion two things could cause this: My GL-INET VPN has 3 clients created, one my work laptop and other my iPhone that I use in India. Now, this iPhone of India has “google chrome” installed.
What I guess is that while thinking about IP of my canada home location, google will see that several devices (laptops and mobiles) use it. It also sees that one of the google chrome that is using it is sending GPS location as India.
I use the LAN with other personal laptop to test that things are working ok. (too frequent whatismyip checking in browser on work laptop might trigger an alarm).
Could google somehow figure that my personal laptop’s location since it is connected to different wifis most of the time?
Does this iPhone thing sounds like correct line of reasoning? What are your thoughts, what could cause it? Any other general suggestions?
One more thing: Since the past few days (after which this issue occurred), I change the mode of internet connection on GL INET client router to repeater from wifi. And it repeats from a USB Modem which creates a wifi network (since that USB modem don’t work with gl inet).
Thanks for reply. I have always checked “my ip”, like extremely frequently and it was never compromised.
I always thought google associated locations to google accounts, but associating to ip is new.
In this case, even a different device shows the “region” that is associated with other ip.
Question: if i ensure that none of the devices sends non-ip location as India, and instead some devices send non-ip location as in Canada near my home, would my region be automatically updated again?
According to Google’s documentation, you can delete all your history in your account’s manage interface and resubmit the location information you want it to record.
Google is very hard in alot of ways, let me explain some factors how it might have found your location:
your device might have been finger printed this can vary from browser to even hardware finger printing.
once it got a hold it tries to track other devices in your network, and it might be learning about your traffic (search history) with counters very similiar as how AI does it to identify a pattern which is required to identify a device to your location.
Often when one device had used a search, or was logged on google services, and you did replicated atleast a few of these steps on a different device, your region will change in your address if that was set.
So if dnsleaktest shows no leaking of your isp dns, and killswitch works properly they either used a client side request to your browser to get the data to fingerprint you inclusive country and maybe even phone location data, or they use the search history / and or pre existing cookies from webshops with scripts to google to gather a identity they link to.
Note that some devices ignore dns settings especially android devices still want to connect to google dns and ignore manual settings, make sure to override dns in the router ui.
And the only other thing what might ‘work’ though maps is different, there are alot of chrome addons which keeps writing bogus as a bot into the search field, I did had a little success with this a year ago but I’m not sure if it can affect maps.
I have a similar issue like you. I have an AX1800 as a Wireguard server in one location and use another AX1800 as a client. After a few weeks Google is pointing that the IP from the wireguard Server is in the clients actual physical location. I presume it was able to do this because of my google account usage on other devices. Mostly my phone as it had wifi location accuracy enabled which scans wifi networks around you to pinpoint your location.
So basially I started spoofing my chrome browsers location and also my phones GPS location to see if google will update it again to the location of the wireguard server.
I also “reported” this problem to google support on this link Report IP problems - Google Search Help
And also disabled my phones background wifi scanning as well!