Keeping websites from knowing where I live

Posted by D Connors on Super User See other posts from Super User or by D Connors
Published on 2010-03-03T00:50:40Z Indexed on 2010/03/20 12:41 UTC
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Filed under:

privacy

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geolocation

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tracking

This questions is related to issues and practicality, not security.

I live in Brazil and, apparently, every single website I visit knows about it. Usually that's okay. But there are quite a few sites that don't make use of that information adequately.

For instance:

Bing keeps thinking that Brazilian pages are way more relevant to me than American ones (which they're not).
google.com always redirects me to google.com.br
Microsoft automatically sends me to horribly translated support pages in Portuguese (which would just be easier to read in English).

These are just a few examples. Usually it's stuff I can live with (or work around), but some of them are just plain irritating.

I have geolocation disabled in Firefox, so I guess they're either getting this information from my IP or from Windows itself (which I bought here).

Is there a way to avoid this? Either tell them nothing or make them think I live somewhere else?

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