IP Geolocation granularity impacts

[terryednacot]

Originally filed at spanicker/ip-blindness#20 by @smhendrickson

IETF RFC 8805 allows for country, ‘region’ (state in US), and city level mappings to be advertised. While the IP Protection proposal will not retain all state/city level granularity, we would like to retain enough to keep inferred geographic content relevant to users, and GeoIP based performance optimizations functioning.

To achieve this, Chrome is considering mapping many unique cities/regions to groups of combined cities/regions. We call these Geos. We are considering using a threshold of 1 million estimated human population for each created geo. This geo will then be shared in the public IP Geolocation feed.

Which use cases of yours would 1 million people sufficiently cover and which use cases would not be sufficiently covered?

[patmmccann]

This is closely related to #2 ; 1 million adjacent users is not able to identify applicable privacy law

[bmayd]

Seems like using human population will lead to widely varying coverage areas which will be anywhere from a few square miles to bigger than entire states (Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming have populations of less than a million).

We use DMA in our models. There are 253 DMAs listed in this Nielsen Fall 2022 Radio Market Survey population, rankings & information which range in size by population from 16,563,900 (New York) to 80,300 (Grand Forks, ND-MN).

We also use geolocation for making decisions regarding regulatory compliance and need to be able to map an interaction source to the jurisdiction by which it is covered.

[clearhop]

How would this work in countries will smaller populations - say 5 million, or 2 million? Is it possible that the only geo location here could be for an entire country, or a country split into two parts? This seems like you wouldn't be able to then use even city levels. Even in the US 700 areas is not a lot, and as @bmayd above says, that would mean multiple states are not accessible by geo.

It seems like this will be an issue for advertisers wanting to target practically any geo level in any country.