I use ProtonVPN now for almost half a year, on my PC and my Phone. It works flawlessly and I’m very happy with their service (including ProtonMail). I use YouTube daily to listen to music or for watching a quick tutorial, I recognized that Google, despite my VPN, now knows my country.
I first saw it on my phone where I have no AdBlock, there suddenly I got ads for my country again and not for the country my VPN server is from. I quickly switched the server to a new country, and I got ads from that country again. Then I looked at my PC and there was now my country letters shown on the top right of the YouTube logo. So on my PC they also know where I’m from, so I assume it is linked to my account. My YouTube Account is separate from my Google-Account I use for my phone so there should be no connection, or does Google make assumptions which accounts are used by the same person?
Sometimes I leaked my IP address because I forgot to check if my VPN is on, so I can see how they get to my public IP-Address, non the less was I surprised to see that they take the effort to collect my different IPs and then figure out my country. Or do they somehow get my phone number and take that as a reference?
Did this happen to other people too? And is it know how Google does this?
It will not affect me for long, because I chose to use LineageOS on my new phone and will also stop using any Google-services. Nonetheless I do not approve that they actively find out where I live and start showing ads for my country. This means in the long run that VPNs, when used with Google-Services, do not protect from censoring.
Your VPN only masks your real IP. Your precise location can be determined by other means; through the geolocation API, through a WebRTC leak, or through an IPv6 leak. You should run a browser test to determine where your leak is coming from. Private Browser Download — Free App | Avast Secure Browser or https://browserleaks.com are both good.
Browser fingerprinting makes cookies more irrelevant for targeting ads now days. Ironically, the more unique your browser set up is, the easier you are to track.
It’s funny and frustrating that we have all these GDPR pop ups that are solving nothing while adding extra nonsense to webpages.
Check out
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A VPN still shields your personal IP though so good to use. Also, if you’re logged into Google, they’ve already got your login, so you would need to clear your cache and make sure you’re not logged in and thus have sessions continuing into your VPN session.
The easiest way if you’re looking to not be tracked is to use Brave or Chrome in an incognito window so all extensions are disabled.
Use Firefox with ublock, decentraleyes, privacy badger and duckduckgo privacy essentials. Between them, they will virtually eradicate browser fingerprinting. I did a test of Firefox with ublock, against Firefox with everything installed. Use whatsmyip.org to confirm that there is no browser fingerprint by clicking on ‘more info about you’. It pulls up Google maps and shows the approximate location. With your browser hardened and VPN enabled, that map should locate to where the VPN server is. Decentraleyes is the best tool IMO. Removes all local delivery network resource injections.
Hey, there r several ways to pinpoint your localization. They can catch your latency and compare to other countries as signature. Social media, crossing information, mac address and so on.
I’m having the opposite problem, even though I’ve chosen a VPN server in my country, and whatsmyIP.com guesses it correctly (plus country limited stuff on national TV plays) youtube thinks I’m in the Netherlands.
Those two sites are very cool thank you for sharing them! I found out that my timezone probably is responsible for the location leak. Now that I see it, it makes sense, maybe I change my timezone at least on the phone, got an arm watch anyway, and hope that all applications work without the correct time.
Even more than that, pretty much every website has Google Analytics or other free Google APIs/SDKs implemented. Firebase is one of the most popular analytics platform used in iOS Apps and I would not be surprised if it is written somewhere in Google’s policies that they merge all this information into a single profile.
So even if you never visit Google.com or YouTube.com directly, Google will know you by your visits to Reddit or because you use a banking App on your mobile device.
Then there is the practice of actually buying your offline information from places like CVS and RiteAid who sell information on your purchase habits which they track using their rewards cards and data aggregators buy it and merge this information with what they gather from other sources.
Are you logged in on the phone to use YouTube? If you prefer privacy over convinience then maybe you should delete your account. In my opinion you may find better answers to your question, as it may not only be VPN related, from folks over at r/privacy
Stopping Google from tracking you is incredibly hard to do since nearly all sites use Google analytics. The point of using Chrome is to use a browser that most other people are using and so you blend into the crowd.
If you set up an analytics account on a site, you’d be amazed to know how much data they are capable of tracking.
I also suggested Brave, which is also a chromium browser, but less widely used. It has less tracking, but makes you more unique since less people use it and paradoxically easier to track via fingerprinting.
It’s an annoying catch-22 that one has to consider the pros and cons of. If you sign in to your Google account or Gmail or a site using Google sign-in in Brave it’s not much different than signing into Chrome.
The only way to completely stop Google from tracking you these days is pretty much to not use the internet.
Scroogle fingerprints your browser and assigns it an id: uniquebrowser369
Scroogle checks your IP and finds out your ISP is comcast, adds to your profile.
You keep going back to Scroogle and it knows you are coming back because the fingerprint is still uniquebrowser369.
You update your browser to the newest pubic build, your fingerprint changes slightly (new user agent). Next time when you visit Scroogle, it checks your fingerprint and notices it is very similar to uniquebrowser369 but the user agent is newer. It confirms your ISP is still comcast and you are in the same general area as before. It updates your fingerprint and keeps your previous history.
May be, you have an Apple TV in your house and you install ScrewTube on it. ScrewTube belongs to Scroogle. It won’t let you watch the trailer for “Nobody” without singing in because it’s marked as mature. So you are like, screw it, I will sign in only on the Apple TV to watch this trailer and will then sign off.
As soon as you sign into ScrewTube, Scroogle knows you are Angela Doe. Scroogle checks your IP and realizes it’s the same IP that uniquebrowser369 uses. Scroogle adds a marker to the profile that either Angela Doe and uniquebrowser369 are the same person or they live in the same household.
You sign into some other service that sells your ID to Scroogle and Scroogle confirms that uniquebrowser369 is actually Angela Doe’s laptop.
You go to other places, visit CVS, do a hundred other things and Scroogle’s algorithms keep building that profile till they know with 97% certainty that you are pregnant and start showing you ads for baby stuff.