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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 (1 children)

Aside from device ID, or maybe if you're using a billing address as something from Australia, I can't see how they would be, you've stated location services are off, VPN will mask the ip.

I didn't even need to use a VPN in my cases between Canada and the US, changing to an account that was in the region that allowed the purchase was all I had to do.

That being said if I changed my Canada account to use the billing address of my US residence instead of my Canadian residence when on the Canadian region, I would get region locked I found, so if you have a primary payment method on file using your AU address you could try temporarily removing or modifying it to have a different address

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nah the CC and billing address for my US account are fully local there. My AU and US accounts are totally seperate and everything is local for each.

I’ve tried both using their apps on my phone and the browser (Safari with privacy relay) with the same result (with VPN etc etc).

I agree, I can’t se how they’re doing this. Must be something I’ve overlooked. Or some new internet black magic they’re employing.

EDIT: Or the search result for the book I want isn’t actually available in the USA and they’ve just messed that up (since I’m searching from the US as far as they can see). I guess I could try buying a different book

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

yea that was my next question, if the title was actually available in the country selected, I had that issue with Netflix searches constantly