[tor-talk] Why does Facebook claim my Russian exit node is in Colombia?

[Sean Lynch]

Geolocation data for IPs is of varying quality. Facebook's likely comes
from a combination of commercial and open/free sources, along with some
machine learning based on features of people coming from those IPs. For the
most part, I doubt Facebook is trying to look at/parse the whois data
directly, since often the address of the owner of a block has nothing to do
with the actual location of a block.

On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 3:28 PM <blobby at openmailbox.org> wrote:

> Can someone please explain why services like Facebook and Gmail are so
> wrong when they attempt to geo-locate exit nodes.
>
> As an example, I set ExitNodes to {ru} and logged into my Facebook. This
> locked my account. When I logged in Facebook told me there was a
> suspicious login. It claimed the IP address of the exit node in Russia
> resolved to Colombia! I checked the IP address with WHOIS - it's in
> Russia.
>
> Can anyone tell me why exit nodes are frequently placed in a totally
> wrong location by companies like Facebook which must have complex
> algorithms to detect where their customers are from.
>
> Is it something to do with the exit node as I can't imagine how Facebook
> could get it so wrong.
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