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I searched this question here and found this answer and this answer but neither works for me.

I set US timezone in Windows, start VPN with a US public ip address, clear all cookies/cache/history, before starting my desktop browser(firefox with restrictingfingerprint enabled). But when visiting google.com, it still redirects to country-specific google domain and my real location(country and city) is displayed below the search result page. I even pass all the leak tests mentioned in the answer of How does my browser know my location when I am on VPN?

No mobile/wireless/wifi is used. Of course I am not logging in google account. How on earth does google know my location?

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    I would say, your VPN is not working correctly.
    – LPChip
    Commented Jan 4, 2022 at 7:47
  • @LPChip what do you mean by saying my VPN is not working correctly? How can I know my VPN is working correctly?
    – William
    Commented Jan 4, 2022 at 8:07
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    Not every VPN is meant to hide your location, and if your VPN is misconfigured it may not route all traffic over the VPN and thus your real internet is used instead. If the rest of the actions were performed correctly, then VPN is the only thing that could cause this.
    – LPChip
    Commented Jan 4, 2022 at 8:16
  • @LPChip I cannot access google.com except through a VPN, so it should not be the case that some traffic is not routed by the VPN. The only possible reason seems that the VPN sends my real ip information together with the packets to google.com. I tried to show the raw http request using a php script uploaded to my website but found no clue how my ip is leaked. Can you suggest any method to investigate how my ip is leaked?
    – William
    Commented Jan 15, 2022 at 10:01

2 Answers 2

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Google knows most VPN providers servers ip, also Google generates a fingerprint of each user from all of his/her browser features(version, resolution, color, language, country and ....) You can use Tor Browser and you see that Google will be dumb to detect your location because Tor browser does not share any sensitive data with Google, in such cases Google will be suspect to you because you don't share the data it needs to identify you, so it asks you to solve a Captcha and in case you were to enter your Gmail it asks to verify your account by entering mobile phone or any other helpful data to identify you.

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What VPN are you using? This is specifically why I never use proprietary VPN software, but only Wireguard or OpenVPN configurations.

VPN can't protect against fingerprinting. To do this, use a browser like Tor (best) or alternatively use Mulvad browser or Firefox with privacy.fingerprinting enabled (or better yet, use Arkenfox.js).

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    – Community Bot
    Commented Jul 6, 2023 at 20:13

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