Why are you worried GPT knows your location?
If you use any Apple stuff, it knows your exact location. Android is the same. Windows knows the exact location also.
So why would not GPT know that? Most webpages know your location, but since they also know your IP, they know in where you are, the city name at least, within a few KM.
You are talking about the location. You should be worried about using Apple, Android or Windows because they know a lot more than that.
update: forgot to mention that if you any of antisocial networks like Facebook or Twitter, they know where you live. And if you are on your room, kitchen or living room. Or outside. Or anywhere you go.
Verified this is a thing. I asked it where I am and how it figured that out. It said it does not have access to my device’s GPS, IP address, or any other identifying information.
I then asked it for specific food locations near me and it listed them with pictures and the name of the town. I was never prompted to provide location information which my browser will prompt me if it is requested. My cookies are only from today. I have never visited the site before today. Linux workstation with arkenfox
I have never logged in or created an account on ChatGPT which I will not do until the potential assassination of whistleblower Suchir is resolved. The wikipedia page is missing a lot of factual data and contains misinformation. conflicts with pictures taken by his mother including the sabotaged surveillance system, blood in multiple rooms and a struggle in the blood, bloody wig, bullet trajectory down from in front and above, text messages and food order, covered in multiple interviews with pictures.
Every service on the Internet knows its users' IP addresses. It's a very short trip for an interested party to convert an IP address to whatever it is that IP geolocation means today in 2025, where we even have things like RFC 8805 that seek to promote the active dissemination of that information.
What aspects of this blanket reality serve to make ChatGPT uniquely concerning, or even interesting?
For the record, it happened yo me as well once. When I asked, it said it gave that location randomly. A small town around the world, random choosen and it is my town is very good probability I would say.
I tried to replicate it as well, could not.
İt happened when I asked for weather, maybe someone can replicate it.
I just tried this and it definitely knows your general location. I asked it for the "best fried chicken near me" and it used my city. Gaslit me as well when I told it it had access to my location and its response that it used Google and Google provided a "default search location".
Obviously it can figure out location by IP, but the lying is insulting and creepy. The fact that lying would likely work for non-technical people is even worse.
Based on my assumption, ChatGPT likely knows your IP address and deduces your location using IP geolocation technology, similar to ip2location.io. However, it probably does not use this information when querying its fine-tuned model. After it receives results from the model, it may reformat the response using your local context, which could include names of places.
I work for IPinfo. I'm not sure how ChatGPT incorporates IP geolocation data in their services, but I have seen open-source LLM-based conversational AI use our service before. The API provides context around location and time mostly.
However, my opinion is that geolocation, at least on a country level, can be largely inferred based on conversational context.
This is mostly just basic IP geolocation. I work for Ipregistry (ipregistry.co), and this kind of lookup is something we provide: country, region, city, ASN, hosting provider, VPN usage and similar signals. Any service that sees your IP can request that information in a single query.
ChatGPT receives your IP when you connect. The model itself does not know your location, but the system around it can add location context before the model answers. Many products do this because it helps with weather, time zone handling or local recommendations.
Accuracy depends on your network setup. VPNs, mobile networks and corporate proxies can make the location drift quite a bit, but at a general level it is often good enough to shape responses.
The more important part is transparency. Inferring location from an IP is normal, but it should be clear to users when that information is being used.
16 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.2 ms ] threadupdate: forgot to mention that if you any of antisocial networks like Facebook or Twitter, they know where you live. And if you are on your room, kitchen or living room. Or outside. Or anywhere you go.
I then asked it for specific food locations near me and it listed them with pictures and the name of the town. I was never prompted to provide location information which my browser will prompt me if it is requested. My cookies are only from today. I have never visited the site before today. Linux workstation with arkenfox
I have never logged in or created an account on ChatGPT which I will not do until the potential assassination of whistleblower Suchir is resolved. The wikipedia page is missing a lot of factual data and contains misinformation. conflicts with pictures taken by his mother including the sabotaged surveillance system, blood in multiple rooms and a struggle in the blood, bloody wig, bullet trajectory down from in front and above, text messages and food order, covered in multiple interviews with pictures.
What aspects of this blanket reality serve to make ChatGPT uniquely concerning, or even interesting?
More details here: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/chatgpt-how-does-c...
I tried to replicate it as well, could not.
İt happened when I asked for weather, maybe someone can replicate it.
Obviously it can figure out location by IP, but the lying is insulting and creepy. The fact that lying would likely work for non-technical people is even worse.
Ask it for your location and it won't know (but will claim your country). Then ask for nearby restaurants suddenly it will know.
it's not hard to infer location data from IP addresses, albeit it's not necessarily an exact science
However, my opinion is that geolocation, at least on a country level, can be largely inferred based on conversational context.
ChatGPT receives your IP when you connect. The model itself does not know your location, but the system around it can add location context before the model answers. Many products do this because it helps with weather, time zone handling or local recommendations.
Accuracy depends on your network setup. VPNs, mobile networks and corporate proxies can make the location drift quite a bit, but at a general level it is often good enough to shape responses.
The more important part is transparency. Inferring location from an IP is normal, but it should be clear to users when that information is being used.