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I was reading this article on how ip to location services manage to determine a geolocation from an ip-adres. At some point the article said the following:

A service might probe data sources where your IP address has shown up before. For example, if you went to an online weather site and typed in your city or ZIP code, that information was linked to your IP address because you made the request online in real time.

But how would one service go about getting this information? i suppose by an official api, or are there other ways to probe datasources for this kind of information?

I am not sure if this is the right place to ask doh :/
If it isn't pls let me know where i could ask such a question!

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Third-party services generally can't just retrieve what you typed into some website – maybe only by literally hacking into the webserver that runs it.

Ads embedded into that website, however, can retrieve a limited amount of things – for example, the kind of forms that just put the information in the URL, e.g. by redirecting you to http://weather.tld/?zip=12345. Ads embedded on this site can know what main page URL they're running in, and although they don't automatically know what each parameter means, they might guess or if it's a popular weather website they might be specifically coded to recognize it.

The same goes for invisible scripts used specifically for tracking and analytics. And of course the weather website itself might have collected and provided this data to a geolocation service. (Or be owned by the same company as the geolocation service.)

Most geolocation information likely comes from elsewhere and is unrelated to individual browsing histories. Sometimes the "IP range - location" mappings might even be provided by ISPs themselves.

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  • Thanks for the detailed explanation! The stuff about the adds is super interesting never thought of that before.
    – FutureCake
    Jul 12, 2019 at 21:45

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