Ask HN: Google suddenly locates me in a wrong country, what to do?
I'm suddenly being detected as located in a Eastern European country (I'm in Canada). This is more than just a minor annoyance:
-Google searches yield results in a foreign language, products are being shown in a foreign currency;
-I'm suddenly unable to order groceries online, as the stores use googleapis to locate me and their sites just lock-up trying to show me the nearest store; blocking googleapis results in all sorts of weird errors or messages as "sorry, we don't deliver to your location"
What could've possibly generated this? on the bottom of https://google.com, the erroneous location is justified by "based on your IP" - but my IP belongs to a major North-American ISP, with whom I've been for 20 years. Weirder yet, it's a fixed IP (second I had in the past two decades, the first one was something like 1.2.3.4, changed a few years ago to 1.2.3.5 - so rebooting the router/modem is useless, as it will get the same IP).
I reported the error twice last week, using Google's very simplified form - but nothing changed.
I'm stumped. Any suggestions? Right now I'm even considering switching ISPs (which I really don't want to, as I'm very happy with my current one), although, from time to time, on the bottom of google.com's page, the location is justified as "based on your previous activity" - what the devil is this? if I look up something in Mongolia, Google decides that I'm suddenly located there?!
I really don't understand what could've lead to this -- and, especially, how to get out of this situation.
Also: I don't browse/search logged into my Google account; as a last resort I logged into Google, manually set my location to where I actually am and ran a search: nothing changed, still being detected in Eastern Europe "based on my IP".
The only thing I can do is force redetection with "Update location", but that: a) is only valid for the current device (I have several in my household) and b) lasts only a limited time.