It's not transparent and, in some instances, leads to worse outputs. ChatGPT keeps telling me "since you are in Ireland, you can ..." when I'm not in Ireland, that's just what my VPN is set to.
At least on a normal site, it will usually ask "You're currently visiting the UK site, do you want to switch to our Irish/EU site"? Here, it just makes the assumption with no indication of it happening.
Almost every personalized site does this. I just changed my VPN to Finland from the U.S. Results from a spot check of sites:
Google will automatically show me results in Finnish, personalized to what Finnish users typically search for. It does have a sidebar to prompt me to switch back to English, but that's because I put in an English query.
Netflix shows me the content that's available in Finland, along with recommendations for top movies in Finland. No option to switch back to U.S.
Reddit, when logged out, defaults me to content from r/arkisuomi, r/suomi, r/finland, and then the default subreddits. Also no indication that they've changed their recommendations.
Expedia defaults me to the U.S, but with a banner to switch to expedia.fi instead.
Zillow has no personalized content on their logged-out homepage, but if I try to search for "Current location" it will show me homes in Finland. Same with Redfin.
Yelp defaults my language to Finnish and shows me recommendations for Helsinki.
Isn't this a large part of why people get VPNs, so they can see what content looks like for visitors from other countries? I got one mainly so I could watch Canadian Netflix and so travel sites would stop charging me California prices (they often price-discriminate based on average incomes in your region).
The Rust install page says this when I load it up on iOS:
It looks like you’re running macOS, Linux, or another Unix-like OS. To download Rustup and install Rust, run the following in your terminal, then follow the on-screen instructions. See "Other Installation Methods" if you are on Windows.
I was on a corporate network where the Windows client has script execution disabled and the Linux server had no internet.
I just hate that website design. People who install Rust are clever enough to know whether they need Windows or Linux version. Just give me a download page with all links :(
Comments
It's not transparent and, in some instances, leads to worse outputs. ChatGPT keeps telling me "since you are in Ireland, you can ..." when I'm not in Ireland, that's just what my VPN is set to.
At least on a normal site, it will usually ask "You're currently visiting the UK site, do you want to switch to our Irish/EU site"? Here, it just makes the assumption with no indication of it happening.
Almost every personalized site does this. I just changed my VPN to Finland from the U.S. Results from a spot check of sites:
Google will automatically show me results in Finnish, personalized to what Finnish users typically search for. It does have a sidebar to prompt me to switch back to English, but that's because I put in an English query.
Netflix shows me the content that's available in Finland, along with recommendations for top movies in Finland. No option to switch back to U.S.
Reddit, when logged out, defaults me to content from r/arkisuomi, r/suomi, r/finland, and then the default subreddits. Also no indication that they've changed their recommendations.
Expedia defaults me to the U.S, but with a banner to switch to expedia.fi instead.
Zillow has no personalized content on their logged-out homepage, but if I try to search for "Current location" it will show me homes in Finland. Same with Redfin.
Yelp defaults my language to Finnish and shows me recommendations for Helsinki.
Isn't this a large part of why people get VPNs, so they can see what content looks like for visitors from other countries? I got one mainly so I could watch Canadian Netflix and so travel sites would stop charging me California prices (they often price-discriminate based on average incomes in your region).
<britishairways.com has entered the chat>
BA doesn't even ask, just immediately switches to the language it assumes matches the geolocation of the IP address you're connecting from...
<sigh>
Just like the Rust homepage.
I was on Windows and wanted an offline installer for Linux. It's impossible.
The Rust install page says this when I load it up on iOS:
“Other Installation Methods” links to https://forge.rust-lang.org/infra/other-installation-methods... which has offline installers for every platform, including various Linuxss.
Thank you for the help.
I was on a corporate network where the Windows client has script execution disabled and the Linux server had no internet.
I just hate that website design. People who install Rust are clever enough to know whether they need Windows or Linux version. Just give me a download page with all links :(