Two very different answers
The panels above look like they should agree, and the gap between them is the whole point of this page.
IP location is an inference. Your provider owns blocks of addresses and routes them through particular facilities; geolocation databases map those blocks to places. Nobody measured where you are — a database recorded where your provider's equipment is. That is why it can be right to the neighbourhood on home broadband and hundreds of kilometres off on mobile, where an entire region may route through one gateway.
Device location is a measurement. Your device combines GPS satellites, the signature of nearby Wi-Fi networks and cell tower triangulation into a position with a stated accuracy radius. Outdoors with a clear sky it is accurate to a few metres. Indoors it drops to Wi-Fi positioning and the radius grows accordingly.
Why one asks permission and the other does not
Your IP address is not something a site requests — it is a property of the connection. A server cannot reply to you without knowing where to send the packets, so the rough location it implies is unavoidable. There is no permission prompt because there is nothing to permit.
Device location is different in kind. It is a sensor reading, and browsers treat it like the camera or the microphone: an explicit prompt, a secure context requirement, a visible indicator while active, and a permission you can revoke at any time from the padlock icon. The difference in treatment reflects the difference in precision — one narrows you to a city, the other to a building.
The distance figure
When both readings are available, the page computes the great-circle distance between them using the haversine formula. It is a useful number for two reasons: it tells you how misleading IP-based geolocation is for your connection specifically, and it is the fastest way to confirm a VPN is working — with one active, the distance usually jumps to hundreds or thousands of kilometres.
Who can see your location, and how
- Every site you visit sees your IP, and can therefore infer the rough location. This is unavoidable without a VPN or Tor.
- Only sites you permit get device location, one site at a time, revocable.
- Photos often carry precise GPS coordinates in their EXIF metadata. This leaks far more than an IP and is easy to forget.
- Your provider knows where your connection physically terminates, regardless of anything you do in the browser.
Privacy
Device coordinates stay in your browser and are never transmitted, unless you click to open a map — which is opt-in for exactly that reason. The IP lookup is a request your browser makes directly to a public API, so we never see its result, and nothing here is stored.
Frequently asked questions
Why are the two locations different?
They are measuring different things. The IP location is where your provider routes your traffic, which can be a datacentre in another city. The device location comes from GPS, nearby Wi-Fi networks and cell towers, and is typically accurate to a few metres outdoors. On mobile connections the gap is routinely tens of kilometres.
Why does the browser ask permission for one and not the other?
Because IP location is a side effect of connecting at all — the server has to know where to send the reply. Device location is a sensor reading, so browsers gate it behind explicit consent, require HTTPS, and show an indicator while it is in use.
How accurate is device location indoors?
Much less than outdoors. GPS needs line of sight to satellites, so indoors your browser falls back to Wi-Fi network positioning, which is usually accurate to tens of metres in cities and can be badly wrong in rural areas. The accuracy figure shown is the radius the browser believes you are within.
Does the map load automatically?
No, and that is deliberate. Loading a map tile means sending your coordinates to whoever serves the tile. On a page about location exposure, doing that without asking would be contradictory — so the map only loads when you click.
Do you store my location?
No. The device coordinates never leave your browser unless you choose to open a map. The IP lookup is a request your browser makes directly to a public API, so its result is never visible to us.