I call myself a power user with good technical knowledge but sometimes even I can't know for sure that it's my login attempt if neither the timing nor the location is correct. Sometimes it's minutes, sometimes even hours. I know that my IP adress is correctly geo-tagged in my town in every database I've seen, so why can't Apple get it right? A different town in a different part of the country. The location is off by a huge margin, 40 miles or so. I've seen this too and it's very annoying and confusing. Interestingly enough, Apple Maps knows my correct location as you can see in the screenshot below.Īpple ID GPS iOS iOS 11 Security Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Evidently, Apple uses the DB-IP database, instead of EurekAPI to query IP geolocation information. That explains why I see strange location information when signing in from a new device or browser. Separate databases map my IP address to the following locations: So why would Apple show a different location? As it turned out, there are various geo-location databases, and each shows slightly different information. What puzzled me was that according to, the geolocation of my IP is Atlanta, GA. If a typical user were to set that up and then be shown a map of a login attempt from miles away, they may be concerned, and reasonably so. This is particularly troubling because two factor authentication is promoted as being a more secure login option. Because if I look on Apple Maps on the same iPad, it pinpoints me, exactly where I am. I don’t use a VPN, which would certainly affect this, and I find it surprising that the Apple devices that already know my exact location can’t pass this info on to Apple’s authentication servers. I’m not near London I’m about 100 miles away. If we both had this issue, I’d expect that the IP address of our network was misplaced in whatever geo-identification system Apple relied on to match IPs with a rough place on the globe. My wife routinely is told she’s logging in from about 30 miles south, although on the same home network, it’s more accurate for me. Clicking Don’t Allow terminates the login attempt. The notion is that you should validate that the location is correct before you proceed to get the code. The first step in Apple’s 2FA is a location alert that appears on every computer and iOS you own logged into the same Apple ID account.
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