Weird Zip code issue

This is not W11 related as such, since it also happened while I was using W10.
Purchased house 5 years ago, I use a different Internet Provider and all network equipment is new.
The problem is that most apps default to a different zip than my location. It happens to all PCs and LT's in the house.'
Its actually a zip of the previous owners "main address" this was his vacation home.
Worse culprits are Home D, Lowes etc which are always wanting to shop his local store or ship to his zip.

Any ideas what is causing this and how to fix it?

I've tried clearing cookies and providing the correct information, then saving but the problem comes back.

This is a geo tag error.
Not much you can do on your end.
This happens when your geographic coordinates are not updated by vendors in your area.
I have the same problem with my zip code, local vendors work fine, some national vendors don't even recognize my actual zip code.

The physical location that is produced by an ISP seems to have little connection with reality.

You can give this a look: IP Address Lookup | Geolocation

If I click on "details" under what it thinks is my address, I get several. One of them is correct.

If I was into online gambling, that could be an issue, as that bogus location may be in another state. Fortunately, I don't gamble online.

The main practical problem I face is that I have a YouTube TV subscription. At intervals, it decides that I'm not in the location it has for me. (Important for local broadcast channels.) I have to use a smartphone app to confirm my location. (I wonder how that works for a customer with no smartphone?) I believe that it's caused by network changes done by my ISP (Concast).

I wonder if contacting your ISP would be useful? I doubt that assigning a primary location to the previous owner's vacation home ZIP was done without some sort of human action. (I admit I wouldn't be shocked to find I was wrong about that.)

Thanks for the reply.
I followed your link and out of about 8 locations 3 were spot on and 5 close enough. None were the 50 mile distant location that keeps popping up.
On that basis I don't think the ISP would be able to correct anything.
Thanks anyway.

britgeezer said:

Thanks for the reply.
I followed your link and out of about 8 locations 3 were spot on and 5 close enough. None were the 50 mile distant location that keeps popping up.
On that basis I don't think the ISP would be able to correct anything.
Thanks anyway.

Click to expand...

I'd check with them anyway.

Of course, if it's large company, their support will be outsourced, and the geolocation stuff may not be in their support scripts. It certainly wasn't in Comcast's support scripts, which meant that I had a hard time getting the support person (in India or the Phillipines) to understand what I was asking. No help was available.

Is it possible that there's anything in your network equipment that is a holdover from the prior owner that may contain geolocation data?

The actual issue is many large businesses will use outsourced IP geo-location data to "guess" where you live. This data may be wrong, but the business has no way of updating your default location because it's someone else's data.

Residential ISP's (like Comcast, Verizon or Spectrum) have blocks of well-known IP's, and 3rd-parties will map a neighborhood to that assigned block. Sometimes it's fairly accurate, sometimes it's further away from your home. Other times it's completely wrong. Unfortunately, there's no way to provide feedback to the 3rd-party provider.

It should work like this


browsers have an option to fill in the fields on the website automatically