ogeiczvm

Phil Knight mentioned this in Shoe Dog. I don't remember the details but he was paid a visit by some officials and they told him he cannot pay factory workers more than they can pay their doctors.

Yes, I did notice that replies to your post were blaming cookies and some incorrect assumptions - hence I wanted to put the time in writing this post separately.

To further validate our assumptions - try to use google maps daily for at least 2 weeks while in Seattle using that exit IP. Logic tells me that it should update once more to the new location (I'd think it's unlikely to be a once off update due to the dynamic nature of IP).

Yes, never logged on. Linking your location back to you personally is a different topic and depends on your usage - but if you have a static IP for > 2 weeks - google.com should show you your precise location (at the bottom of the page).

There is no path forward that permits both "I don't accept Google's data practices" and "I allow Location Services for Google mobile apps on my iOS device". :)

in my case I have a family member sharing my VPN endpoint (DNS blocking does wonders on iOS) - which was part of the initial puzzle as I didn't use any google services at that point.

Not a path forward but a workaround - rotate the IP periodically and start "fresh".

I actually mentioned this in another reply. I never tried but it should work in an android emulator - set the GPS coordinates to something interesting - of course, something that won't potentially get you in trouble.

I never tried this - but I would've expected that after using Google Maps for a couple of weeks while in London - the GeoIP data would've been updated again back to the UK?

I am aware of the IP leak in iOS but that's only for Apple services, Google Maps will always use the outbound VPN IP.

Something to note though - in my post I never mentioned the "real IP" - all tests were done to change the geoIP data of the VPN IP - and that always works as expected.

It would be an interesting test if someone has the time and resources - use conflicting location for the same IP. Could be done in an emulator in Android Studio I assume? I would think that it would simply treat it as bad (inconclusive) data and not update the GeoIP.

I always use private browsing window (and note my recommendation on how to replicate - to use Firefox Focus as this does not have any persistent data) - so yes.

It's definitely updated on GeoIP as it's device independent (eg: a laptop using the same exit IP will automatically be redirected to that country when it changes).

thank you - I already had GreaseMonkey installed (for old.reddit.com redirection) - wasn't sure if they're compatible but they are - it worked nicely without any modifications - thank you very much. depending on the size of the list this may be cleaner than the ublock origin one - thanks again.

of course, in retrospective now it makes sense - thanks for taking the time to look into this, appreciate it.

My day to day browser is a hardened Firefox (plenty of about:config tweaks, resistfingerprinting, ublock origin, temporary containers etc). For signing up to Oracle Cloud I used a tmpfs based Chromium browser (ie: completely fresh, factory defaults) to avoid issues resulting in my hardened browser. Oracle cloud refused to accept my credit card with a bogus error message saying something about fraud and/or incomplete/incorrect personal details. I searched for the error message and someone on a random website mentioned about having issues with Chrome and to try Firefox. I found that quite unusual as it's usually the other way around but I tried using my day-to-day hardened firefox and instantly worked and account activated within minutes. Go figure.

Of course, you could mitigate this by setting up your own VPN on something like Linode, but unless you're regularly rotating IP addresses, you've just traded a pseudo-identifier that multiple people/devices share for a persistent identifier.

This actually happened to me. I'm using a persistent VPN (50% to access my private infrastructure and 50% because I have a hostile ISP).

I mostly don't use any Google services (maybe one google search a month and the occasional google map search but I avoid when I can) and I was very surprised when once I did a google search and saw my postal code at the end of the page. The IP address was for a VPS (in the same city but with a different post code). I found it unusual but didn't pay too much attention. A few months later I moved places (different post code) and after a while google had my new post code at the end of their search page. That's when I found it troubling and assumed that a family member's iPhone was using Google Maps and based on the 'directions' usage they figured out that that IP address has a home address for those GPS coordinates. (The iPhone in question is reasonably 'hardened' with background updates off and location services only 'when app opened' and disabled for most system services). That was the only plausible correlation between IP address and location google could have done automatically - neither I nor the said family member no longer login to old google accounts we had many years back.

That's when I started rotating IP daily (which is trivial in my case as I use lightsail, I issue a shutdown from a different server and then a power on, AWS rotates the IP automatically out of a very large pool - so far I haven't gotten the same IP twice).

The only problem I have with lightsail is that I often get a 'dirty' IP so I rotate 4-5 times before getting a good one (I test this by going a curl on a website that sends google captcha on dirty IPs but lets the 'good' ones straight in).

Sometimes governments have a sense of humour: https://www.govt.nz/404

I have a nextcloud instance (alongside a few other things). I run it on a $10 VPS (disk is a RAID1 array between the local VPS disk and a remote disk (ceph?) that the provider gives. That's the 1st level of storage redundancy.

I periodically (every 10 minutes) rsync everything across to another VPS (different provider). (you can use mysql replication, mysqldump, etc)

Every hour I run an rsync with --link-dest to a storage VPS and once a month I tar everything up (I take the midnight backup of each day) and it goes to long term storage. The resulting archive is only marginally (10-20%) more than the real size on disk as it mostly contains diffs on top of the actual data. I can failover easily between instances if the primary one goes down so it's reasonably highly available.

If you want less complexity you can use the S3 backend (IIRC nextcloud supports encrypted data at rest) and just ensure that's backed up regularily. Nextcloud itself has versioning for changed data.