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Comment by duiker101 | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, you make up about 0.000001%[1] of the internet users. There is no saying in what this can be applied, it doesn't have to be for language or anything like that. It doesn't even have to be anything customer facing, and if it's just some stats you will probably probably just be a bit of noise.

Don't get me wrong. I totally agree that this thing is definitely not accurate(it thinks i'm 1300mi away) but it's good enough to get a general idea.

[1] made up number to get my point across

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Yes, and you've made up a number that reinforces your point. A number that, if wrong, could negate your point.

Many more people are using VPNs these days. It's still not a large percentage, to be sure, but people are indeed doing it. Hell, I'm on my company VPN right now, and this site mis-identified my location because our VPN is set up to route most addresses in AWS's address space through the VPN (and ipdata.co appears to be hosted on AWS).

Then you have stuff like people on planes (usually this is all routed through a single PoP somewhere), people on mobile data who are roaming internationally (often proxied through one of the home carrier's PoPs), etc.

I think using IP geolocation is a decent first-order approximation, and is useful if there are no other ways to get that information, but it must always be treated as unreliable.

I agree that IP geolocation is a good approximation. It is never accurate up to street level.

Meanwhile, there is API to detect VPN, so that we can aware that the geolocation is good up to the server physical location.

https://www.ip2location.com/ip2proxy-web-service

We're working on creating our own offering on this. We'll have Tor Exit node detection first and are planning to make that generally available to all our users within the week at no extra cost.

Our API now supports detecting Tor nodes https://api.ipdata.co/103.10.197.50

I think the issue is that with the rise of VPNs, you're now looking at >1% of users being from a mislabelled country.

It's more than that, for some countries.

Usually right because people from these countries are trying to evade location-based discrimination and privacy infringement

    Indonesia -- 47%
    Thailand -- 39%
    Brazil -- 36%
    Turkey -- 36%
    UAE -- 36%
    Viet Nam -- 35%
    Saudi Arabia -- 34%
    India -- 32%
    Malaysia -- 32%
    ...
    UK -- 14%
    US -- 14%

https://wi-images.condecdn.net/image/3K6WrWwGrKN/crop/810

I can not for the life of me read anything in the linked image.

Here is a better version of it: http://cdni.wired.co.uk/1920x1280/g_j/infopornhorizontal_1.j...

Thanks :)

Those are clearly wildly incorrect numbers. I doubt if even 4.7% (a tenth of your figure) of internet users in Indonesia know what a VPN is.

It's pretty clear that VPN usage has increased dramatically in recent years. And at least I cited something. I could point to other surveys with comparable results. What's your evidence that it's so much lower?

Not knowing what a VPN doesn't exclude you from using one. Many workplaces use VPNs and it's likely that public internet access points (such as libraries, lounges, restaurants and cafes) could be using VPNs too.

Wikipedia says that Indonesia has an internet penetration rate of 50%. It might be reasonable to assume that a low penetration rate means that a significant amount of the internet access is happening in a work place rather than in a residential place. If a significant amount of access is happening at a work place it might also be reasonable to assume that a lot of that access is happening over a VPN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

Actually, more like 20% of all Internet users :)

https://wi-images.condecdn.net/image/3K6WrWwGrKN/crop/810

Believe it or not, but my Mobile carrier frequently hands out IPs that are geolocated to anywhere but my country. I usually get French or Dutch websites.

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