No… I’m not stupid. I know that VPN’s hide your IP and show you are somewhere you’re not. What I mean is that I am currently connected to a Montreal server. Why do certain sites say I’m somewhere else? One says I look to be in Dallas, Texas. If I do a “whatismyipaddress” search, it returns the same IP PIA shows in the app window, so… ???
Many online services are using hopelessly outdated GeoIP databases.
PIA can’t make them update their database.
Check maxmind, and if that says you’re in the appropriate spot, go complain at the tech support channel of whichever website is giving bogus results for your location.
IP addresses are not directly or deterministically connected to physical location. Often the connection between IP address and location can be inferred or calculated or looked up somehow with some accuracy, but that should be considered more luck and less fact.
IP addresses are like your cell phone’s area code. It’s an address of a place, but isn’t necessarily accurate.
Because geolocation by IP address is a stupid idea that needs to die.
For the same reason as the last person who asked…
Yo!
Same happens to me
I’ve posted about it here
I’ve logged into twitter through what is supposed to be a physical server in Europe, but got an alert for a login from Florida.
The responses i got were basically excuses for why this is ok, well, it’s NOT OK, PIA is probably routing all traffic through 3rd party data centers without routing the traffic back to the supposed exit point.
PIA has been shit for the past year or 2, and they probably turned into one big traffic logging operation for the US government. It’s neglected and probably dying, so they’d probably just take a good compensation from the government just to be one international traffic monitoring hub instead of just the US ISP traffic.
In short, some mofo from PIA should officially answer this or they’ll start losing customers daily.
I’m not complaining about anything. I’m asking a question about something that didn’t make sense to me. Since I don’t know everything, that how you learn… by asking questions.
But when you go to www.ipaddress.com, it does actually show the location for whatever server I’m accessing.
I was going to say that’s not entirely accurate, but I think I get what you mean as far as the area code goes. A cellphone can have a detroit area code, since that’s where it was activated, but if you go to tallahassee, you still appear to be in detroit. Right?
But I don’t see how IP addresses can be different. If the IP address is registered to a company/individual out of new york, wouldn’t that address show as being… in new york?
Yeah… well… I didn’t see the last person ask or the response s/he got, either. But thank you for that very insightful response.
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate that it’s not just me.
I’m not complaining about anything
I’m suggesting that perhaps you should - but complain to the appropriate folk, not PIA who aren’t at fault here 
That just means they “guessed” it right that time. Such services have database of addresses and probable locations that they build up. It has nothing to do with VPNs. Basically they connect the IP address to some business and check where that business is located. And they could use the latency or number of hops etc to also get a range of distances to crosscheck. And likely some other ways of narrowing down the locations. But the actual IP address itself has nothing to do with any physical location.
I imagine that could only happen to someone who is blind and literally cannot see, as there’s a post on this every few days
Then again, most blind people on the web use screen readers or braille translators, and can still read the posts
Ah… I gotcha. I’m sorry… I misunderstood 
I guess if I read every post to the PrivateInternetAccess sub every single day, perhaps I would have seen it. I, myself, have better things to do, though, so…
Or, maybe, if you just checked the titles of the top twenty or so new posts, like you had vision and could read for ten seconds
Or used the search function, like an adult who knows how to look instead of expecting to be spoon-fed information