Location Issue on my laptop with Windows 11

Yea, I've already tried that. I can set my default location in the Maps app, but Edge still wants to show me in Boydton.

JB-D-M,

There's a relatively clear explanation for all of this, that though it's reasonably well documented, isn't the typical client centric situation we've all been looking for, which is why it took me so long to find it in the wrong places with the wrong searches.

Friday afternoon I did a couple more tests of my own system after again allowing Windows Privacy, Location settings and ensuring none of the various Edge Settings, Site Permissions items were potentially blocking the testing sites we'd been using. I initially got basically the same results with the 2 IP-based selections displaying my wireless ISPs Milwaukee, WI egress location and that Bellevue, WA one I thought might be Microsoft, as well as both IP testing sites more granular Where-Am-I-Now like selections displaying within a few houses of my true location.

However, though these same locations typically continued for at least a couple additional requests, if I continued to click refresh multiple times the more accurate street location results would eventually revert to Boydton, VA as a few of you had also reported.

This seemingly odd behavior that didn't appear to follow any specific pattern other than, 'the more you try the worse it gets', finally made me think that something was potentially, actively attempting to 'protect' my system from a possible 'attack' by these websites making requests to identify my precise location. This sounds suspiciously like the Edge, Privacy, 'Enhance your security on the web' setting kicking in to protect my system from a potential attack, even though I'd specifically disabled that to ensure it wasn't interfering with my testing.

That's when I began to think differently about this entire situation and think of it as raising the bar on protection in general, searching for 'Microsoft increasing location protection' instead, which led me to these general articles about Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative.

A new world of security: Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative - Microsoft On the Issues

Prioritizing security above all else - The Official Microsoft Blog

Even though these articles were general in nature, this got me thinking about the Microsoft Secure Network specifically as part of this wider Secure Future Initiative, so I searched for the former and looked a bit further down the page beyond the Microsoft articles until I found the following from Cloudflare, while the second similar article was found by adding Cloudflare to the search.

Cloudflare is now powering Microsoft Edge Secure Network

Cloudflare Powers Privacy Enhancing Features in Microsoft Edge Secure Network | Cloudflare

One of the linked articles within these two describes how this technology works in more detail, and it's worth mentioning that Microsoft has roughly the same number of datacenters worldwide that Cloudflare mentions at over 300, and this generally fits with the symptoms we've seen from these location issues as well.

1.1.1.1 + WARP: More features, still private

If you look at Microsoft Edge's VPN Browser page in the FAQ section, the descriptions of how this is intended to work shows that it roughly matches what we're seeing, though the issue is we're being consistently routed from a single datacenter, rather than the more geographically similar location that all of these articles indicate should be displayed.

Try Microsoft Edge's VPN Browser | Microsoft Edge

Can I use Edge Secure Network to obscure my location?

Edge Secure Network obscures your specific location and IP address from third parties, to prevent tracking and protect your privacy. Instead, websites and services will see a location that is geographically similar to yours, so you can still look up local movie times, nearby restaurants, and more – without compromising your personal data. Edge Secure Network VPN does not allow you to select a specific region or location for your traffic to route from. 

What I'm guessing based on all of this, is that either we're part of a smaller test group Microsoft is using to confirm this Edge Secure Network is functioning correctly, or possibly we've simply got some sort of conflicting issue within our individual configurations that's interfering with its proper operation.

Regardless of what's actually happening to cause our specific issues, we now at least know the true source of the attempts to reroute our traffic and how they're expected to operate. Based on the fact the number of datacenters in the US used for Microsoft Personal account - Edge Secure Network egress may be limited, this may as I guessed be a smaller test group than what will eventually exist. It's appears though, that even though this Cloudflare partnership and the Edge Secure Network itself are documented in these articles, apparently few within the Microsoft Support structure for Personal - consumer accounts are currently aware of how this works or may interact with customer systems.

I haven't tried to investigate whether any of this is documented in recent updates, but at least now we know what we're looking for. It's also important for those having these issues to know whether they personally are using one of the pre-release versions of the Edge browser, since those should have shown at least somewhat similar symptoms before they hit the general population using the final release clients.

Rob

Interesting Maggiekev,

Your description provides another complication which may indicate why there haven't been literally hundreds of these complaints, since you're apparently logging into both your Microsoft and Google account t once, which most like me don't even use on our PC

However, bentokage who mentioned the Default location settings in their thread above, had also opened a separate thread in these forums where they started complaining of exactly the same sort of ping-pong sharing of the Boydton, VA site in their case on both their phones and other devices, so your description of this interaction between logged in accounts is likely explaining their symptoms as well.

Since my own Microsoft only account operation doesn't use a Google account except on my phone, I never saw this interaction back to the phone, but I can't be certain it had nothing to do with my simpler problems with Boydton itself, since the Google account does actually exist.

However, even though I've seen no additional Windows update to this point, the changes I'd already made including the Default location one I mentioned here last seem to have stabilized my own operation.

So, it's probably only in more extreme cases like yours when using both Microsoft and Google accounts together for search and similar purposes that this additional work may need to be done to resolve the side effects having both accounts swapping location information in the background can cause.

Just as an FYI, most if not all of those items in your list of changes are the more classic ones I'd seen in other older threads during my research, so they really just appear to be needed to remove the potential corruption of either Maps app, location history data or some autoconfiguration items that might create added confusion as well.

Rob

bentokage,

Great catch! I hadn't thought to look at the Default location because I'd set mine to the city I'm located near years ago when I had also changed all of the location and other settings to avoid being tracked.

However, this had also been overridden for my own Windows 10 configuration to display the downtown Boydton, VA location that the data center located near that small town is set to display.

That's the missing item that made no sense to me, so it's really that same change that's affecting all of us who display that address, since the Default location is the fallback that's always displayed when Windows can't otherwise provide a more accurate location via any of the other methods you've chosen to allow.

So, it's easy to see why someone could think this is either a bug or something that Microsoft broke, since in effect they unilaterally made the decision to set this Default location item to the same data center address as the Microsoft Secure Network selections will display, most likely because they're trying to protect you from being tracked if you haven't chosen to set this to something specific yourself.

FYI, when I looked at this particular setting based on your post, I immediately tried clicking hat same 'Show my location' dot in the center of the navigation bar on the map that appears, which since Allow apps to access your location was still turned on, was accurate to within a few houses. Once I returned that to 'Off' as it has been for years, clicking the dot again displayed We're not allowed to find you and offered to turn Location settings back on again.

So exactly as you've stated, you can set this Default by entering one manually with either a specific address, zip code such as a local town or city, or clicking Choose location to select it on the map instead, placing it as close or far from your true location as you prefer anyone to be able to determine.

So, for JB-D-M, that's the item that changed that you perceived as a bug, while in truth it's just a default setting change that Microsoft made that though it's likely documented somewhere, it's no doubt in such an obscure location that finding it would be as difficult as discovering it was for us. While bentokage made a correct decision to look at the Default location setting and found it had been altered because he didn't make the same erroneous assumption I did that they'd left it alone as I'd set it previously.

Rob

My experience is the opposite of yours. Again I’m not using any of edge’s secure networking features, the edge vpn is not on, I’m not blocking location information from any of the sites and it still thinks I’m in Boydton, VA.

JB-D-M,

Can't say what your precise issue is then, since the Boydton, VA address detection clearly means that your traffic is exiting the Microsoft network from that facility, or at least appears to the particular destination website you're using to test as if that's where the traffic is being sourced.

Using that knowledge as an input, you need to try and determine what particular configuration on that specific PC might reroute your outbound traffic into the same sort of tunnel that Microsoft uses for those services. Maybe as I think about it some more, I'll come up with a possible reason for this odd behavior, but at present it simply makes no sense to me at all, since the Secure Network services are the only reason I personally know of that Windows itself routes your network traffic through their servers.

Since we're not sitting in front of your device it's not possible for us to review your settings and I'm really not interested in playing 20(,000) questions. You simply may have one of the other older problems that's been known to cause similar issues in the past, but the particular symptom seems to point directly at this relatively new issue for reasons I've already explained.

I will state that I had to make sure that my Site permission, location settings in the Edge browser weren't blocked in order to ensure the current info was being picked up by the testing websites, but typically these were indicating this failure rather than showing either Microsoft datacenter address, while the address info only became more accurate in my case as I removed any of the Cookie or other location related blocking, or disabled the Secure Network features in Edge or Windows.

< EDIT > Maybe try resetting your browser and/or deleting any history including Cookies if you haven't already done that, though I'm guessing you may have and that's really just grasping at straws, since it sounds like the browser settings aren't working properly if this won't appear to change for you. Corruption of certain settings or even the apps like Maps themselves was often part of the troubleshooting recommended for location problems in the past.

Rob

Thanks for this Rob, I had great hopes that syncing the time would resolve my issue, but apparently not. I too am stuck in Boydton, VA. Some browser work, some do not. Chrome puts me in the correct location, but Firefox and Edge put me in Boydton, VA. When I first go to the maps page it is fairly close to my actual location, but as soon as I click the centre location button, and allow location access, off we go to Boydton. It doesn't matter if I'm using Google maps or Bing maps, the result is the same. Only Chrome shows the correct location.

Out of curiosity I checked my ip location in at least half a dozen location services and every one of them put me in the correct location, except Where am I now? - My current location in real time (whereiam.net), which put me in, you guessed it, Boydton, VA.

John

John,

You must have posted this while I was writing my last very long post, but I just decided to review the thread to see whether my recent idea explains at least most of the posts.

As I reviewed the posts, I began to have some thoughts relating to why there are still so many apparently flaky results that your own post brings into better focus. It does appear that at least some of these people's devices or apps sometimes work properly, so that implies that Microsoft must have either found a way to pass the location information through their Secure Network VPN tunnel (maybe IPv6?) or there's some other additional settings involved in aggravating the problems further.

The Maps location button is apparently performing a different type of request than the initial startup state of the same app, so it's likely whatever Microsoft has done to compensate works with one set of requests and not always with some others.

You may also notice that in my recent post I mentioned the flakier issues I had with that same Where am I now? app and the fact that at least it was apparently using some Google backend services, which was evident when I broke it by selecting to 'block' rather than 'allow' the location requests and caused it to display URLs that contained a strange Google result that appeared to be an error of some sort.

The reason the various browsers likely display differing results is that only Edge is directly affected by at least some of those Secure Network features, while others might have varying results based on how they route their network traffic, either through or around those VPN or similar secure tunnels. For example, Chrome is known to use their own location services I mentioned in an early post, which use items like your local Wi-Fi or others that don't require them to resolve the IP address issues that affect Microsoft, or any others depending on the results Windows itself supplies to the apps running on top of it.

So, to simplify my thought process in this post, I suspect that Microsoft is trying to actually fix the VPN server location problem I've been discussing here by somehow passing another seemingly valid network identifier such as an IPv6 address through their tunnel, bypassing the incorrect, but really accurate server address of Boydton, VA and displaying the location of the actual client system instead. It's this tunneling 'trick' that's apparently not working in all situations and thus still providing what to most people looks like inaccurate location information, when in fact it's the trick itself that's fooling the far-end servers you're attaching to into believing that the requests are really coming directly from the client machines themselves.

I haven't seen any technical explanation for this yet, but it may actually exist, I simply haven't been trying to look for it. Now that I realize that some explanation must exist, I'll look around some more to see if I can find it, though I'm not in a hurry since what I've discussed already is enough to explain the original issue behind what's causing these location problems.

Rob