Set default country according to IP

[swaldman]

Title:
Set default country according to IP

Area:
Shop

Summary:
When making purchases in the shop, it would be nifty if your country could be defaulted to a best guess based on IP.

Description:
It would be a minor convenience feature, and might involve quite a lot of work/hassle/complexity... but I thought I'd throw it out there in case somebody says "oh, that'd be easy actually" :-)

Drawbacks: Slowdown as the lookup is done; don't know whether this would be significant. Maybe there are some situations in which people would be offended by an incorrect guess?

Poll #13460 Set default country according to IP

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
6 (13.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
23 (50.0%)

(I have no opinion)
16 (34.8%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[swaldman]

Just curious - to all the people voting "shouldn't be implemented" - why not?

(and also to the one who's voted "Other (please comment)" without a comment, but maybe that's coming :-)

[denise]

i can't speak for others for sure, but my guess is that most people find geolocation-by-IP really creepy and intrusive.

(or find that it's usually wrong like a wrong thing with wrongsauce, but that's more on the state level. mine usually thinks i'm somewhere in virginia, for instance, instead of MD.)

[kaberett]

I travel internationally enough that it would probably inconvenience me more than it would help. I am aware that I am probably not typical in this respect. :-p

[killing_rose]

Facebook is convinced my entire household lives in Maryland off of IP addresses, which, as you know, is massively incorrect.

[matgb]

At least Virginia and Maryland are close to each other, my old dial up ISP used to always put me the other side of the country-I knew why, but it was daft.

However...

Geolocation is something that some people are freaked out by, but it's something you as the site are basically doing anyway, if you're on the shop page you're on a site schemed page ergo analytics are on. It's just aggregate data.

If we don't like to encourage privacy by obscurity, why intentionally pretend to people we can't work out where they are just to make them feel a bit better? For those of us in a non-US country, this would be a simple improvement with few drawbacks (obvs, US resident international travellers would then need to click something they don't currently but I'm guessing that's a smaller proportion than non-US residents).

I, personally, am not that bothered, especially if the suggestion to add the UK to the top of the list is implemented, but the argument against of "it's a bit creepy" is basically the same as "if I pretend it's not happening I don't know about it", which isn't good practice for users that are concerned about this stuff.

[swaldman]

To be fair, AIUI Analytics does only provide aggregate data - AFAIK Dreamwidth doesn't look up location for specific individuals. Although, as covered elsewhere, in this particular case the individuals have to tell Dreamwidth where they are anyway!

[kyrielle]

I have no opinion either way, but there are also a decent group of people (using firewalls/bouncers to access sites their country might not allow, or to anonymize themselves) for whom this would always be wrong. I have no idea if any of them use Dreamwidth or are voting here, though.

[aedifica]

If we don't like to encourage privacy by obscurity, why intentionally pretend to people we can't work out where they are just to make them feel a bit better?

Because we want people to give Dreamwidth money, and not get freaked out by privacy concerns while they're on the payment page about to do so. :-)

[arethinn]

When we briefly had MetroFi in my area, geolocation seemed to think I was in New Jersey. I am in California (and thisclose to where Google was doing the same thing over in Mountain View, with I think more lasting success). Never figured out how that one worked.