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I was just visiting DNSleaktest.com and I found that it could find my location to my town. Most IP tracers think I'm about 30 miles away, saying I'm in Luton. So is it possible that it's just really accurate or does it use another method to get your location?
Gaben Newil
Posted 2014-12-27T04:47:30.050
Reputation: 112
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There are many ways to get a good estimate of location, even without GPS.
If you have WiFi (e.g. a laptop, Wi-Fi Positioning System can be used to give fairly accurate location.
If you have other radios, e.g. GSM, triangulation can be used on cell towers.
These are on top of traditional IP to location mapping which others discussed, which gives your location typically up to the city or area - sometimes down to a zip code.
Finally, note that if someone wants to be super savy, they can match you against similar IPs they have seen before (who have provided location), and although you do not have location service/sharing on, they can find your location fairly accurately.
Also, see https://support.google.com/maps/answer/1725632?hl=en
Mahdi
Posted 2014-12-27T04:47:30.050
Reputation: 550
0
Well, he has only one JS https://www.dnsleaktest.com/ana/piwik.js
And you can look onn github https://github.com/piwik/piwik/blob/master/js/piwik.js source code. And see why is it better than others (or not). It is under GPL v3 licence so you can use it your projects.
malakrsnaslava
Posted 2014-12-27T04:47:30.050
Reputation: 2 533
Interesting, dnsleaktest.com shows more accurate location information for me than other location reporters (such as WhatIsMyIP) as well.
– BenjiWiebe – 2014-12-27T05:06:23.567There's geolocation enabled in your PC or Browser setup. By the way, why you don't give us more accurate informations about the system you're using. That's the best way to have an answer. :-S – climenole – 2014-12-27T05:45:23.780
yes there are tons of sites like http://www.ip2location.com/ that can give an accurate location upto 1km radius circle. I would love to know how do they do it. And @climenole, this is not limited to a system or kind of browser that we may use. I have tried it on two different pcs with ubuntu windows having browser as chrome, mozilla and microsoft explorer. And after doing this, I found the dame exact result on IP2Location. I was using same Public IP for both systems. They were used alternately.
– Damon – 2014-12-27T05:48:37.550That is just scary. And here I was worried about the NSA. Better add another layer of tinfoil to my hat. :-) – fixer1234 – 2014-12-27T07:37:05.463
Windows 7, latest Google Chrome :s
Whale then, I guessed there must be some sort of geolocation enabled in browsers. Anyone know a way to implement it on a website? It'd be useful to log where my visitors come from – Gaben Newil – 2014-12-27T08:57:28.917
@climenole I happen to know that the browser I used does not have geolocation enabled (and my PC doesn't have GPS or anything like it)... now what? – BenjiWiebe – 2014-12-27T14:26:56.620
They're not always accurate, with my home adsl they show my position off by almost 60 km – Fabiusp98 – 2014-12-27T23:16:04.543
Wow, that's pretty crazy. So dnsleaktest is giving you guys pretty accurate readings too? When I connect with my VPN, it just from United Kingdom – Gaben Newil – 2014-12-28T09:23:45.437
You should be able to work out where someone is, roughly from rdns and dns. This is only useful for testing if your vpn is giving away your current location. – Journeyman Geek – 2014-12-30T09:46:58.727