alt Hacker NewsUnless I'm missing something, this seems like an incredibly long winded way to check the users IP location?
For example, connecting to a VPN and checking https://cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace gives me `colo:CPH` (Copenhagen) which is far from my nearest CF datacenter (geographically), closer to the IP location from my VPN provider (Oslo) but still not particularly close?
If I don't use a VPN, I don't even get the capital city of my country (which I'm in right now), I get a colo approx 250 miles north. So I also dispute that Cloudflare always returns the "nearest available datacenter".
Don't get me wrong, the write up is cool and certainly interesting - just not convinced on the real world applications here...
Replies
>just not convinced on the real world applications here...
As a piece of data alone, the results are probably not of significant use.
The real-world application (and potential danger) is when this data is combined with other data. De-anonymization techniques using sparse datasets has been an active area of research for at least 15 years and it is often surprising to people how much can be gleaned from a few pieces of seemingly unconnected data.
Do you not buy that a user's IP location needs to be protected?
There is a reason applications go to so much effort to proxy requests to resources such as images. It's not free to do this.
Having your IP address not revealed to people that can message you on Signal seems like a pretty reasonable privacy expectation.
I guess it can be useful for tracking fugitive political dissidents, terrorists, etc. If you can narrow their location down to 250 miles, it's already very useful information. And without raising any suspicions.
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> Unless I'm missing something, this seems like an incredibly long winded way to check the users IP location?
It's less accurate than that. IP Geocoding can be down to the city level in many cases. This is _maybe_ nearest cloudflare data center