How does Amazon/Audible know my country with VPN and private browsing on?
How does Amazon/Audible know my country with VPN and private browsing on?
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.
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On what device? Android, iOS and Windows have a Region option where you select your country, the browser and any apps can read this trivially.
On iOS. My VPN is set to USA and I’m logged into amazon.com (not .com.au).
Where would this setting be?
- Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Region
- Settings -> YOUR NAME -> Media & Purchases -> Account Settings -> Country/Region
Both must be changed to a different region to fully switch. Requires a valid payment method from that region (e.g. a debit card from that region). There are consequences to changing regions too, so be careful.
From my experience, sometimes you also need to contact Apple support to finish the change process. Otherwise it may just revert back.
Overall, Amazon surely knows where you are now and it will be set in your Amazon account, I suspect there is nothing you can do.
The best way to achieve what you want is to boot something like TailsOS and create a new account while under the VPN in that region. With a payment method from that region.
VPNs are not magic. Most big companies nowadays have means of detecting actual user locations, which is pretty trivial if you use an app or an operating system that leaks data when under the VPN.
Disable location services.
Neither Amazon or Audible apps have any location services permissions.
Regardless, disabled it system-wide and didn’t make a difference. Thanks though.
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
They could just have a VPN detector, that's harder to work around, sec.
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.
It's definitely this. I often forget that my Amazon account is tied to Canada (even with a .com.au email address) and it's only when I see how cheap shit is that I realise I'm actually on amazon.com not amazon.ca