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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

Sites preferring geolocation over Accept-Language as a means of picking the language is one of my pet peeves. Preferring geolocation over a logged in user's stored setting is beyond absurd.

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With weirdly sticky behavior too once you’ve left that area. My google sign in prompt was in Italian for over a decade after logging in there once on a family vacation. Only with the latest login revamp did that setting finally get purged. Everything else was always english, profile set to english etc.

I’ve just had an issue where my google searches were stuck defaulting to Sydney, Australia after being there for one week.

I think that is a pretty safe assumption from Google. People die trying to leave Sydney.

There's a trend in commercial software where folks keep adding epicycles on epicycles, often based on barely stat-sig wins in A/B tests, to the point of systems becoming completely impenetrable. I bet this was a result of that.

This was so annoying when visiting Poland recently. I don't speak Polish.

Even after setting my preferred language on my Google account, Google Search was still speaking Polish to me.

Prime video is amazing for this; in Germany but only dubs available? Admit defeat that the orig audio is somehow not available but not even English subtitles?!

With video I think that it’s sometimes a licensing thing. As in, the streaming service licenses subtitles from a third party and the rights are limited to specific countries.

That's a weird one. It's common for people to prefer the original audio, and most Germans understand English.

Germany has a very strong culture of dubbing essentially everything. Just finding any showing of a film in its original language at a cinema is very difficult outside of major cities for example.

Same in Spain. Often only the Spanish dubbed audio is available making the content useless to me.

With the increase in ads on streaming platforms I've just reverted back to piracy. The enshittification has gone too far.

Same in the Netherlands. It gave me everything in Dutch, even after I logged in.

Ha, I even started to receive spam mail in Polish (kind of "we got your webcam, give us money"). They're clearly using the collected data and are subject to the same problems.

Wait, how would that work for scammers?

Scammers can also buy aggregate information, just like advertisers

Agreed. I live in Finland, but my preferred language is English. Many many sites send me Finnish by default, although Google directions will always be in Swedish.

I seem to have to "change results to English" on google searches at least once a week when it forgets which language I've setup and used for the past ten years!

Now that google is offering translated Reddit posts my flow on my iPhone when I google something is

Google -> Reddit -> open translated post in app -> share in app with browser again -> click on show original.

I’ve never ever let any involved websites actually use my native language. Neither Google nor Reddit.

If you set the language to something that isn't the default anywhere, and isn't standard for your country (so for you, English followed by Danish would do) Google seems to respect the preference.

But you add a lot of entropy to the privacy violators.

And geolocation is often wrong. Half of IP locators locate my VPS in one country, a quarter in another country, 1000 miles away, and another quarter in a third country, 1000 miles away from the first two.

When you think that 90% of browsing devices are phones or laptops… beyond any possible comprehension

Selecting a locale based solely on geolocation is absurd, and the reverse is equally true. Just because you prefer a specific locale doesn't mean you're physically in that country. Unfortunately, I encounter this anti-pattern far too often.

Yeah I live in Spain but don't speak the language so well. It's super frustrating when I get redirected to Spanish versions of sites. Sometimes they even redirect me back to Spanish after I deliberately choose English.

Netflix used to offer Audio and Subtitles in several languages. Now even subtitles the only option I get is Spanish (Latin America)... Like come on, sometimes I want to learn another language, understand the real word behind the sounds.

I may understand Audio, because of Edge location storage costs, but Subtitles... that’s blasphemy.

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