Privacy

31786 readers

391 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How does Amazon/Audible know my country with VPN and private browsing on? (aussie.zone)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Title.

Trying to buy an audiobook with my US account from Australia. Am using a VPN and a fresh log in using a private browsing window. Still getting the “not for sale in this country…”

How does Amazon/Audible still know my country?!

EDIT: Thank you everyone for your suggestions, but I feel like we’re no closer to figuring out how Amazon is detecting my physical country. If they have some new “trick” surely this is a privacy issue as well?!

EDIT 2: Important details, this is on my iPhone using both the Amazon and Audible apps, and via the web with Safari (mentioned below). Doesn’t work.

I gave up and went to my desktop and was able to complete the purchase following the same steps without issue. So 🤷‍♂️ ?!

Clearly Amazon is scraping some information from the phone to region lock the purchase. Still would love to know given VPN isn’t masking my location apparently.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Neither Amazon or Audible apps have any location services permissions.

Regardless, disabled it system-wide and didn’t make a difference. Thanks though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

If you're using apps they could be leaking your information from local Wi-Fi information, Bluetooth information, DNS if it's not routed through your VPN properly.

I'm not sure about the internals of iOS itself but they certainly may have tattletales built in available to apps

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They could just have a VPN detector, that's harder to work around, sec.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if both apps and webpages have access to the phone date/time for logs and to time stamp purchases etc. And Amazon use that to decide you’re not in the place your VPN is telling them.