adrian_k wrote:One side effect of the news/weather thing is that I noticed that w10 knows my location. I’m guessing from the ip address or WiFi router name?
I can help you there. It's not specific to Microsoft.
Everybody who knows the real external IP address of your router knows your rough location.
Try it for yourself:
https://whatismyipaddress.com/
VPNs can help by hiding your real address, although they slow down your connection a bit and cost money. You also run the risk of being blocked by some services if your 'apparent' IP address is a known VPN endpoint.
Dynamic Mike wrote:Given we both have location services disabled on our phones & we've never called them before, I still can't figure out how they knew.
Again, not a big tech company thing. Your phone
is a location beacon in and of itself. As to exactly how the electric company knew I can't say, but there are any number of reasonable, if speculative, explanations.
Folks worry about big tech, internet tracking, cookies and whatnot but if you have a mobile of any description then even without any data or wifi enabled you're broadcasting your location to the world at large.
Further, if your phone has ever been used to call this-or-that service then they know your number and there are databases that track mobile phone numbers based on the registered address for that number. There are also databases that track the geolocation of your IP address, so if you use wi-fi or data services on your phone for any reason at all then unless you use a VPN service you can be assured that every single website or other remote IP address your phone communicates with knows where you are.
It shouldn't happen, but it does. Mobile phones are wonderful personal tracking devices that almost all civilians carry around willingly and that the secret services of years gone by couldn't have wished for in their wildest and most optimistic dreams.
I don't use a VPN (I don't feel the need to) but if you don't want pretty much everyone to know where you are and what you're accessing it's the only real defence short of binning the mobile and terminating your ISP subscription but it still won't hide your location from the phone providers.