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Comment by wu_187 | Hacker News Reader

Both AT&T and Comcast do this with IPv4 as well.

Yeah, NTL/Virgin Media in the UK do the same in that their IPs geolocate to where the node/head end is. In a city, it's not going to be specific enough to uniquely identify you but it's still weird seeing ads that aren't that far away.

On the other hand, the IPv4/v6 addresses on my A&A connection geolocate to either London or Bracknell (where their office is), about 400 miles away. I get a lot of pointless ads for things in Surrey that I have no intention of visiting.

i have never used google search but the other day someone used that infront of me and on the bottom i saw what appeared to be "pin code for approximating your current location for local results" and something to that end. that scared me big time because this was like my home pin code, my small city has like 30 so this is narrowing me down to a single one which i am not comfortable with

Right, but is Google doing this with the information they get from your IP address or something else entirely? Is it just coincidence that your IP address corresponds to your ISP’s office which happens to be relatively local?

With loose enough permissions your browser has a geolocation API that, depending on your device, will be a hell of a lot more accurate (if you have Wi-Fi hardware it can use that to work out where it is relative to the known locations of the SSIDs it can see, or straight-out use GPS).

None of this has anything to do with IPv6 - you give away some location information with your username and profile on this very site, for example.

I believe Google has their own IP geolocation database, likely seeded from all their apps that have location access because the location given at the bottom of the search results pages is always far more accurate than any other IP geolocater I've seen and there are others on my WiFi network who use Google services with location.

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