You probably read about it all in the news on outage in Zerodha's online stock trading platform causing huge inconvenience to its users. In case you haven't heard, visit this page to learn more about it.
Zerodha apologised and clarified that the IP/Geolocation database routine upgrade caused the outage. Based on IP addresses, it notified its users of logins from new geographical locations which sent out an unexpectedly large number of alerts. The incident details note mentions that this led to a large influx of password reset requests from perplexed users, putting a heavy load on their login systems and in turn resulting in login failures. If you are wondering about how this IP/GeoLocation database works, read further to get more details.
What is IP geolocation?
IP geolocation is a technology for websites that need to determine users location, simply by sourcing a user’s IP address location. Hope you have fair understanding on IP and compute networking as Im not briefing them here. The popularity of the mobile web and application paradigms introduced the necessity to contextualize the service provided with users location information. While smartphones included this capability using modern cellular technology, the complexity of the web standards and the privacy requirements concerns made the structured gathering of such information difficult.
There are many techniques to collect such information. However, the most used technique to get positioning information without the explicit gathering of GPS data is IP Geolocation. This information comes handy in online services landscape, geofencing, fraud detection, and online advertising areas. An IP GeoLocation database provides the mapping between any IP address in the world to a latitude and, longitude coordinates. Despite the questionable accuracy and precision, these databases are the standard approach for location-based services on the Internet.
There are many vendors including free and commercial ones. Usualy these vendors do not disclose the algorithm and techniques they use to provide the mapping between IP and location. From generic information published on the vendor websites it seems that they are likely using a combination of active and passive measurement, possibly combined with machine learning technologies.
Challenges
IP geolocation database technique poses many challenges. With the increasing use of VPNs, complexity further increases. An IP geolocation database relies on the IP address used by very few users in a certain area. Therefore, it’s difficult to achieve 100% accuracy with IP geolocation data. To add to that, IP geolocation moves between different physical or virtual devices and also between geographies. This makes it even more challenging to ensure the accuracy of the IP addresses in the database. Also, the geolocation of a mobile device might be even more complicated as they obtain new IP addresses as they shift location.
These service providers usually offer two common ways to access this data. One can either download the database itself or access it through an application programming interface(API).
Alternatives
HTML5, GPS, user registration data, and cookies approach are some of the alternatives for IP Geolocation database.
HTML5 primarily tracks users through the browsers they are using, many prominent browsers have this feature enabled, and it works on a per-session basis.
GPS is a popular form of location tracking on mobile devices; it is by far the most accurate form of geolocation, being able to discern within a few feet the user’s exact location.
User registration data and cookies are both primarily associated with websites. Based on the user registration information supplied, content is personalised for the user on an individual basis.
Cookies on the other hand store location information that users have provided elsewhere. Cookies are also capable to gather user behaviour while users are browsing the web.
These alternatives comes with their own disadvantages, making IP based geo targeting the optimal solution for tech-savvy entrepreneurs. For example, GPS is firmly entrenched in the mobile space, while HTML5 and cookies depend on browser.
Conclusion
Hope this brief article helped you to gain basic understanding on IP Geolocation database and the need of it in Zerodha's business that constantly requires to collect users location for achieving localization, location based offering, promotion and etc. I'm concluding this article with my concern on data protection, privacy, legal use of information while such location data is getting accumulated and utilized all over.
Further read
https://www.abstractapi.com/guides/why-is-my-ip-geolocation-wrong
