I carry a vpn client router with me and I have to turn it’s wifi ON to get the internet in hotel. (My laptop always connect the router through a cable tho.) Will this client router eventually get mapped to the wifi-location database?
Theoretically, any phone nearby my router can detect the wifi and can accurately map the wifi ip to the wifi-location database based on the phone’s location info even without login my wifi?
If so, we should use two client routers? One to turn on the wifi to connect to hotel. Another one just works as a bridge that never turn the wifi on, using cable to connect 1st router and laptop.
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TL;DR
Maybe.
Google determines its users’ location by cross-checking where the IP address is with the geolocation data it has of devices that use that IP address. If Google detects a significant number of devices using that IP address in a certain area, it will change its location for that IP address. Since the IP address is your VPN server location but the geolocation data is your physical location, google may update it’s records of your home IP address to your current physical location.
But this usually requires time and enough data points for google to be sure, which is unlikely to happen if your wifi is only on for a short period of time.
No, you do not need a second travel router. The location info never makes it past the VPN to your device.
Kinda advanced topic… so maybe allow me to tag u/Chris_Talks_Football thanks…!
Isn’t there another way Google (or whoever) does location tracking, where it just uses the Wifi networks around your device to help geolocate your device? I always assumed Google did this by having lots of people’s devices always scanning for Wifi + tracking GPS location, and pairing that Wifi network (or is it the MAC address of the router?) with that GPS location.
It’s about the MAC address that can’t be hidden. The laptop knows the ip/MAC address of the client router. Someone’s iPhone nearby also knows the ip/MAC address of this router by wifi signal. If Google/Apple collect these data (they probably do, that’s how they locate you based on wifi without gps), wouldn’t they find the actual location easily?
The router’s Wi-Fi signal is not your VPN’s IP, it’s the local public ISP’s IP.
The MAC address is only used for routing within the local network. Once your packet reaches your router, it will modify the sender’s MAC address to itself in the L2 header and your MAC address will no longer be visible.
I probably got it… Basically the WiFi client and cable client are are seeing my router as a different thing… However, if I let an location share enabled device to connect to the router WiFi, that becomes local network member, and that will potentially map my router to WiFi-location database?
I’ll jump in with some questions if I can. FWIW, I’m a software engineer, and have a better-than-layperson’s knowledge of networking, though I’m certainly fuzzy on various details.
It’s my understanding that Google/Apple/maybe other services can use nearby wifi networks to help geolocate your device. My guess about how this works is that they have lots of other people’s devices always logging both their current geolocation, and what wifi networks are nearby, and they build up a mapping of wifi network → location. Then they can use that to locate devices based on nearby wifi networks.
If that’s the case, wouldn’t having your travel router broadcasting a wifi network at all be a risk? I.e. your router broadcasts a wifi network. Some devices nearby (your phone, other people’s phones, etc.) observe it and log the wifi network + the location. Later, when your laptop connects to the travel router’s wifi network, the service can accurately geolocate your laptop because that wifi network is in its mapping.
And further (if I’ve gotten this all right so far), I would think that your laptop could still be located by the service, even if it was only connecting to the travel router via a physical cable, and not via the router’s wifi network, and you had wifi totally turned off on your laptop.
How much of that am I getting wrong?
Yeah definitely don’t let a location share-enabled device connect to your router’s Wi-Fi. I can see that not being a good idea. To what degree, I’m not sure.
**Edit:** I think even if this did happen, as long as your laptop client device never logs into any Google service, you *should* be fine. But don’t quote me on that.
**Edit2:** Moral of the story is, keep your personal devices off the travel router and just install a native VPN client if you want to use a VPN for them.
The travel router’s Wi-Fi is not the problem. It’s your work device’s Wi-Fi that matters. If you keep the Wi-Fi turned off on your work device, then no geolocation can happen on that device. You’re simply using the internet (wired) from the travel router which passes through your VPN at home first and that’s all your device sees. Your device does not see the public Wi-Fi network upstream.
How would a wireless device unconnected to your router’s network know anything about your wired laptop connected to your router? That doesn’t make any sense.
I see. Thanks for coming back and answering, even across accounts!
So let’s say your laptop is connected to the router via ethernet cable (with Wifi disabled on the laptop, and the router not broadcasting a Wifi network either just for good measure). Are any of these things visible to your laptop:
-
A network name/ID broadcasted by your router
-
The MAC address of your router
(I’m pretty sure the network name/ID question is stupid - network name/IDs only exist for Wifi networks right? But not when internet is being provided over ethernet, right? But I’m asking just in case.)
If either of those 2 pieces of data is visible to your laptop, it seems possible that this data would also exist in a database somewhere already, tied to a location, and so that would open a path for your laptop to be geolocated.
It wouldn’t.
The unrelated wireless device only knows about the router/its network. The wireless device observes network X in location Y and logs that. So now Google/Apple/whoever can potentially conclude that router/network X is in location Y.
Separately, your laptop connects via ethernet cable to your router. Potentially (though I’m fuzzy on the networking details here) this lets it identify that router and/or network. That gets logged as well, and given that your laptop is connected to router/network X, and router/network X is believed to be in location Y, someone concludes that your laptop is in location Y.
Hey u/TheWiredNomad1 - just wanted to ask if you might have time to respond to my comment below (i.e. my sibling comment to this comment, in this thread). I know it’s an old discussion (sorry for the necro comment!) but I’m very curious to hear a response if you’re up for it
MAC address of router doesn’t matter… again it’s your device that matters.
Please reread this comment from earlier:
The MAC address is only used for routing within the local network. Once your packet reaches your router, it will modify the sender’s MAC address to itself in the L2 header and your MAC address will no longer be visible.
That account got banned… for who knows what reason. But I am the same person. Let me see your comment, one sec.
Sure, I’m not saying the MAC address gets leaked that way. I’m imagining something like this:
- At some point in time, your router connects to another device that does some logging for Google/Apple/whoever. While it’s connected, this other device sees the MAC address for your router, and logs the MAC address + its true location to Google. Google now in a database somewhere has an association between your router’s MAC address and the location your router is truly in.
- Later, you connect your laptop to your router via ethernet. Your laptop can see your router’s MAC address. It logs your router’s MAC address. This logging, plus the association in step 1, can now be used to locate your laptop.
As for “what device was connected to the router in step 1 to log its MAC address?” I can think of a few potential possibilities:
- Just maybe the router your router is connected to, is doing this logging. I.e. the router in your Airbnb that’s exposing the Wifi network that your router is connected to to get internet. (It seems unlikely that such MAC address geolocating logic would be built into a router though.)
- Maybe you connected your phone to your router at some earlier time. Your phone seems like a prime candidate to do this MAC address geolocating logging. (Though, if this is the case, you could try to avoid ever connecting any location-aware devices to your router.)
- You enabled tethering on your phone, and your router connected to that as an internet source. (I’ve thought about doing this to have a work phone with internet and a VPN while I’m out and about. The idea being I have: a work phone, in airplane mode, with Wifi turned off; it’s connected via ethernet cable to a small router (e.g. GL-iNet Shadow); that router is running a VPN of course; that router is getting its internet connection by connected to the Wifi network broadcast by my personal cell phone, which has tethering enabled. A rather involved setup, but I was hoping I could use this when I’m oncall so my work phone could have internet while I’m out doing things, without it being geo-locatable.)