Privacy

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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]

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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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[–] [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.