How does an IP address tells where the computer is geographically located?
It doesn’t.
However, IPs are “owned” by companies and that ownership is public record, therefore, you can get a reasonably good idea of an IP’s location by linking the two. This is a common enough practice that there are companies who bundle and sell this information.
So you can’t know, but you can make some guesses–and those guesses are good enough for some purposes.
It is, however, notoriously inaccurate at any level of detail. Identifying the country the IP is used in will be far more accurate than the city. If you’ve ever seen demographic data where Kansas is the peak, that’s a geo-IP failure.
This is a simplistic explanation of Geo-IP referencing, but does answer the question. If you want to know more you should research Internet Number Authorities, Regional Internet Registries, and ASNs.
Public IP geographic locations identification has been tossed out the window since VPN’s are so common and even the common internet user can do it. People can use software to make their machine look like its from another country and hop around in a very simple manner.
If you want to see some info of where an IP could be located is go to https://whatismyipaddress.com/ to look…
IP geolocation rely on publicly available registration data, which can be inaccurate at the city level. However, country- and state-level IP geolocation data is pretty good. It’s more a guessing than a science, data is gathered from the nearest ISP network block. When users are in the suburbs, the IP geolocation shows the location of the closest metropolitan area or that of the ISP office. Also, other data can be used like from geofeeds that websites and ISP publish, and you can do distribute network probes to estimate the location based on the network latencies.
If you want to see some rough info of where your IP could be located, check https://www.ipparrot.net
So how did someone get my location ( told me almost pinpoint) after exposing my ip over xbox?
think that as something to do with the Certification authorities or something like that for domain registration or webapps i am assuming it worls the same for public ip addresses someone in Germany wont have the same ip address as someone in canada this is purely assumption if anyone knows please fell free to correct me
Back in the old days IP blocks were assigned to certain regions in the world. But those days are long gone. IPv4 are a valuable asset and traded across the globe for substantial money. When you buy public IPs from some other country you contact the geolocation providers and tell them to change the country associated with your IPs. You don’t have to do that but you should as some services/blockings rely and those databases.
If you’re in a major metro area - it’ll give a good idea of where you are at in a general sense. This is less true in rural areas. I travel to Idaho a lot and figured out that my cell carrier routes all data through Salt Lake City Utah (I won’t go into how I figured that out… points if anyone can guess lol) which is a three hour drive from where I stay in Idaho. but yeah - it just says who owns the IP your using and where the traffic into the public cloud that IP originates from.
IP protocol has no indication of geographically. However, IP geolocation service provider such as IP2Location is adding estimated location based on several advanced techniques which is widely discussed in research papers found in Google Scholar.
What happens if a person has a VPN? Wouldn’t a VPN mask the IP address and hide a person’s location? How does a VPN work?
Some years back I had a WFH job where I was located in Houston, TX but the companies data center and VPN concentrator were in India. Any time I would do a Google search like “restaurants near me” while I was connected to the VPN I would get results local to downtown Pune.
It was funny the first time . . .
Sites like IPQS just cross reference the IP to databases. Additionally, they would also ping the IP from several servers across the world to get an approx. location match. The IP itself doesn’t carry any geo related/identifying info.