If a website thinks you are in a city you have never visited, nothing is broken. An IP address does not contain your location. Companies estimate it from databases, and those estimates are often off by a city, a state, or occasionally a whole country.
How IP geolocation works
There is no map built into an IP address. Geolocation providers build databases that match blocks of addresses to places. They combine registration records (the address you gave your internet provider when it received the block), network routing data, measurements of how long packets take to arrive and information from apps that share their location. The result is a best guess, and the guess is usually good for the country and weaker for the city.
The most common reasons the location is wrong
- Your provider's address block is registered elsewhere. Providers often register a block at their head office or a regional hub, which may be in another city. Your connection then appears to come from there.
- You are on a mobile network. Mobile traffic usually exits to the internet at a few large gateways, not near your phone. Your address can appear hundreds of kilometres away.
- Carrier-grade NAT. Many customers share one public address, so the database cannot point to one household. See what is CGNAT.
- You are on a VPN, proxy or work network. The address then belongs to the VPN server or your employer. Check with the VPN check.
- Out-of-date data. Addresses get reassigned. A database may still list the previous holder's location.
- Different providers disagree. Each database makes its own estimate, so two sites can show two different cities for the same address.
What you can do about it
- Check what ScanMyPrivacy shows on the home page, and compare it with another IP lookup site. If they disagree, the guess is genuinely uncertain.
- For services that need your real location, let your browser or phone share its own location. That uses GPS and Wi-Fi, not your IP address.
- If you pay for a service and it misplaces you, contact its support. Many geolocation database companies have a form for requesting a correction, and your internet provider can sometimes update the registration of its address blocks.
- If the wrong location is a benefit, remember that sites can combine your IP with your browser's timezone and language. A mismatch is one of the signals the full privacy scan flags.
Is a wrong location a privacy problem?
Quite the opposite. An imprecise location is a small privacy benefit, since sites that rely on your IP cannot pinpoint your home. The risk is the other direction: your internet provider knows exactly which customer holds the address, and cookies and fingerprints can identify you without any location at all.