Chatgpt Knows My IP Geolocation
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
hermandaniel.comTechstory
skepticalmixed
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ChatgptIP GeolocationPrivacy
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Chatgpt
IP Geolocation
Privacy
The discussion revolves around whether ChatGPT can determine a user's location using their IP address and the implications of this capability.
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Nov 9, 2025 at 8:07 AM EST
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update: forgot to mention that if you any of antisocial networks like Facebook or Twitter, they know where you live. And if you are on your room, kitchen or living room. Or outside. Or anywhere you go.
Imagine it telling someone "picking cotton" is a fine job, with some hidden knowledge about that person's ethnicity – with ChatGPT denying it used that information even when asked.
Do you see now how easily this gets problematic?
I then asked it for specific food locations near me and it listed them with pictures and the name of the town. I was never prompted to provide location information which my browser will prompt me if it is requested. My cookies are only from today. I have never visited the site before today. Linux workstation with arkenfox
I have never logged in or created an account on ChatGPT which I will not do until the potential assassination of whistleblower Suchir is resolved. The wikipedia page is missing a lot of factual data and contains misinformation. conflicts with pictures taken by his mother including the sabotaged surveillance system, blood in multiple rooms and a struggle in the blood, bloody wig, bullet trajectory down from in front and above, text messages and food order, covered in multiple interviews with pictures.
Everyone knows that OpenAi blatantly violated copyright during training but no one really cares
That was the purported reason [1] and I do not care about copyright either. Some believed that could be a threat to a potential 10 billion to 100 billion dollar industry. I do not know if that is enough for one to take preemptive measures.
[1] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/what-did-s...
What aspects of this blanket reality serve to make ChatGPT uniquely concerning, or even interesting?
At least on a normal site, it will usually ask "You're currently visiting the UK site, do you want to switch to our Irish/EU site"? Here, it just makes the assumption with no indication of it happening.
<britishairways.com has entered the chat>
BA doesn't even ask, just immediately switches to the language it assumes matches the geolocation of the IP address you're connecting from...
<sigh>
I was on Windows and wanted an offline installer for Linux. It's impossible.
> It looks like you’re running macOS, Linux, or another Unix-like OS. To download Rustup and install Rust, run the following in your terminal, then follow the on-screen instructions. See "Other Installation Methods" if you are on Windows.
“Other Installation Methods” links to https://forge.rust-lang.org/infra/other-installation-methods... which has offline installers for every platform, including various Linuxss.
Google will automatically show me results in Finnish, personalized to what Finnish users typically search for. It does have a sidebar to prompt me to switch back to English, but that's because I put in an English query.
Netflix shows me the content that's available in Finland, along with recommendations for top movies in Finland. No option to switch back to U.S.
Reddit, when logged out, defaults me to content from r/arkisuomi, r/suomi, r/finland, and then the default subreddits. Also no indication that they've changed their recommendations.
Expedia defaults me to the U.S, but with a banner to switch to expedia.fi instead.
Zillow has no personalized content on their logged-out homepage, but if I try to search for "Current location" it will show me homes in Finland. Same with Redfin.
Yelp defaults my language to Finnish and shows me recommendations for Helsinki.
Isn't this a large part of why people get VPNs, so they can see what content looks like for visitors from other countries? I got one mainly so I could watch Canadian Netflix and so travel sites would stop charging me California prices (they often price-discriminate based on average incomes in your region).
More details here: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/chatgpt-how-does-c...
reveals that your approximate location is included in the system prompt.
Ask it for your location and it won't know (but will claim your country). Then ask for nearby restaurants suddenly it will know.
I tried to replicate it as well, could not.
İt happened when I asked for weather, maybe someone can replicate it.
it's not hard to infer location data from IP addresses, albeit it's not necessarily an exact science
Obviously it can figure out location by IP, but the lying is insulting and creepy. The fact that lying would likely work for non-technical people is even worse.
However, my opinion is that geolocation, at least on a country level, can be largely inferred based on conversational context.
ChatGPT receives your IP when you connect. The model itself does not know your location, but the system around it can add location context before the model answers. Many products do this because it helps with weather, time zone handling or local recommendations.
Accuracy depends on your network setup. VPNs, mobile networks and corporate proxies can make the location drift quite a bit, but at a general level it is often good enough to shape responses.
The more important part is transparency. Inferring location from an IP is normal, but it should be clear to users when that information is being used.