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Comment by bvda | Hacker News Reader

I've used a similar trick to pretend I was 18+ on certain websites in the past, have never had any issues with it.

I think every teenager on the Internet routinely does that.

And every Canadian learns to press the I'm from the US button on every website (see: car sites) if they want to see the better website and aren't actually shopping.

It's gotten better for Canadians as the average quality of sites has improved, but it was consistently designs from a prior era and 1/10th the content.

As someone from the US, I've never heard about this before. Could you explain what that is? Why is there a "I'm from the US button" on sites?

A lot of eCommerce websites will only ship to/operate in the U.S. for a variety of reasons (business registration requirements, consumer protection laws, currency exchange, international shipping, etc. Hence websites like newegg.com and newegg.ca.

Companies that operate in multiple regions sometimes use these buttons to make language-specific or region-specific content available. For example, some cars may only be available in some regions or may have different branding. Another example is how the Apple Store has region-specific editions. Also Netflix filters the library by region.

Certain product lines or pages will be missing, or the details will be less informative on the Canadian/International regionalized website. Not to mention most online shops will only ship to the US.

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