Comment by sanjayparekh
2 years ago
You're confusing the tech/innovation with the uses. I agree with you that not respecting, or rather assuming, a user's preferences is a bad UX mistake. That said the tech is also used for content control without which streaming of shows and films would be impossible to contractually happen. It is used to protect your bank account. It is used in a myriad of ways that are much less visible than just picking a language or showing targeted advertising.
None of the ways you mentioned are the most optimal, or do I say, even valid ways to achieve a certain social goal.
Content control geo fencing is only recent, and streaming was there and will continue to be there long after IP geofencing stops being a practice. In fact, I believe if the technology wasn't around, streaming would have been accessible to more people.
Any amateur "carder" (what credit card thieves call themselves) knows that IP geolocation is in fact good for them, because they can easily load up a proxy or VPN, making this arbitrary, problematic (read: tracking) factor in their favour to steal money and commit identity fraud. There are easily accessible programs online that provide ZIP code accurate IP proxies.
I can go on and on about how terrible IP Geolocation is for almost everyone.
I understand your article was about the tech.
But you did mention the motivation of geoip for detecting location for selecting a language, and given that's what people still do these days despite Accept-Language headers being available for most clients, I think it's worth a call out.
Oh, I agree with you. I don't really understand why sites don't use language headers which obviously specify the user's preference. I've never been on the implementation side for sites that were clients - I just explained the tech, showed how they could use it, and then they used it in those ways and many times more. Maybe it was just easy rather than having to use multiple variables? Maybe they don't know about this header (which would be shocking IMO)? But back in 1999/2000 time frame, no site was using the language header which may or may not have existed back then - I honestly don't know when that was introduced into browsers (I was a Netscape Navigator user back in those days).
I'll also say that even though I invented IP location technology, I am an avid user of privacy-shielding VPNs. Just because you invent something doesn't mean you don't regret some of the uses of said thing.
> I don't really understand why sites don't use language headers which obviously specify the user's preference.
Accept-Language headers aren't obviously the user's preference, though. There's the four users that manually set it, and for them it is their preference. Mostly everyone else is getting a default based on their OS language, which often isn't really something they set either.
There's also the problem where the country appropriate website for where you are may not have a language you understand.
Obviously it would not be contractually impossible to allow streaming. The contracts would just not require IP based fencing/allow for global distribution, or e.g. use the billing account's jurisdiction, which is a more reasonable solution anyway.