Cool, even our privacy protection is fraught with scammers and liars.

reincoder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I work for IPinfo.

No, the article does not make this conclusion at all! It was carefully written to highlight the nature of virtual locations of VPN exit nodes and does not make such conclusions.

The article is written by our founder, who is accessible to the VPN industry at large and is open to feedback and comments.

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flexagoon 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> I work for IPinfo

Ngl, I never knew that those IP location tools are actual companies with full time employees. I always assumed they were just made by some random guy in an afternoon by wrapping maxmind API. Interesting to hear that that's not the case (at least for ipinfo; maybe some of the consumer-oriented IP lookup websites are like that)

	▲	reincoder an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Our headcount is approximately 70 right now. Most of engineering consists of data engineers, researchers, and data scientists because data is our product. Then we have infrastructure engineering, software engineering, integration engineering, support engineering, solutions architects, mobile application engineering, UX/UI designers, website engineering, API engineering (separate from the website because of the volume of traffic we receive), a full commercial team with partnerships and sales, finance/accounting, legal and a marketing team. I think I am still forgetting some people. We also work closely with consultants who are foundational to the internet as a whole. We have an open hiring policy for the right talent. During our offsite, we had to rent out a small ship (ferry?) to host everyone: https://x.com/coderholic/status/1975333382604398702/photo/4 More than a decade ago, when IPinfo launched, a lot of community interaction was done by our founder. Now, you have me in a full-time role talking to people. My role is literally called Developer Relations. We are not just a IP geolocation company; we are an internet data company. IP geolocation and VPN detection are only products to us; the team and goal are actually quite huge.

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balder1991 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Actually, most VPN providers explicitly label the virtual locations as such, I think the famous ones at least do it (ex: Proton and NordVPN even explain them in their respective docs).

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kachapopopow 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

well to be fair it's not always important to have the server at the geoip since a lot of the time you can measure the real latency of a user behind an ip address anyway.

the only important bit is that it is made clear whenever a given country falls under some category that allows things such as traffic analysis and cataloging.

it's actually often times preferrable to lie about the server location for lower latency access geo-blocked content, particulary when accessing US geo-restricted content in europe.

if you want true privacy you have to use special tools that not only obfuscate the true origin, but also bounce your traffic around (which most of these vpns provide as an option)