I work for IPinfo.io (feel free to check your location data with us to see if we are correct as well). It is most likely that your ISP is sharing your zip code via a WHOIS/geofeed record.
For me, Firefox and without iCloud Private Relay engaged, Maxmind is within about 2km and doesn't get the city correct (but we're right on a border), and IPinfo is about 15km as the crow flies (and gets the city entirely wrong).
If you reach out to support and drop a correction with us, that will be quite helpful. This is an unusually high deviation, so we would like to investigate it.
200 KM means there is room for improvement. If you reach out to support and provide a correction, that will be quite helpful. If you mention that you came from HN, I can report back on why we had such a deviation.
Our detection model at ipinfo is largely based on behavior models of IP addresses. We have 700 servers around the world from which we run internet measurement, allowing us to reliably determine which IP addresses are VPNs or proxies. These measurements are largely ping/traceroute data, which enable us to estimate a number of different things most importantly IP location data.
If you are interested in what kind of other information we can discover from our internet measurements, check out our tags page: https://ipinfo.io/tags
Excuse my bias, as I work for IPinfo. Rolling your own bot detection service is something you should explore if you want near-absolute coverage.
We intentionally do not provide an IP reputation service as many sophisticated bots mimic the "good reputational" aspect of IP addresses. Usage of residential connections or essentially being vetted by CDN/cloud services makes making bot detection ambiguous.
That is why we provide accurate IP metadata information. Whenever you detect patterns of bot-like behavior, look up the metadata such as privacy service usage, ASN, or assigned company, and then start blocking them via the firewall.
I hope you are not being limited by our (IPinfo) free tier request limit in any way.
If you own a public website, you can take advantage of IPinfo's creditlink system and get up to 100K requests per month: https://ipinfo.io/contact/creditlink.
Also, our summary tool and map tool are free and do not require you to sign up. You can take advantage of them as well. They support up to 500k IP submissions.
Additionally, the free country ASN database provides unlimited requests, as it is just a database. Use the MMDB version of the database and the IPinfo CLI.
I understand you probably have a system in place, but please ping me if you need any assistance, especially with using our free IP database.
- grepip: extract IP addresses from text.
- summarize: The command summarizes the IP addresses and provides output in text. It is different than the summary tool I mentioned.
- bulk: Bulk/batch enrich IP address. Output can be CSV or JSON.
If you need any help or want me to take a look at those IP addresses (or ASNs and organizations), please create a post on the IPinfo community. I can share the code and instructions with you.
I work for IPinfo, where we provide a VPN detection service. Some people think that our VPN detection service restricts access to various services through a VPN. However, if someone is paying for their internet and then chooses to pay an additional $15-$20 a month for a VPN service, it is likely to be a source of good traffic.
From the point of Facebook, I think they use SMS verification and their app also requires location permission. Facebook is pretty good at preventing bad signups. What they need to do is invest that effort in keeping their user base safe.
reply