Also it'd be important to document this "feature" in the user guide at: https://matomo.org/docs/geo-locate/

Possible solutions:

• rounding lat/long values to some degree (the degree to be determined later)
• keeping a db of city => lat/long pairs, though this seems far more difficult

See also #12735 for an even rougher rounding.

I just checked and both DB-IP and MaxMind seem to report the last three digits as 000 and basically round. This can change though in the future.

Also I'm thinking the rounding can still be a problem for rural areas where only few people live. You could then potentially maybe still identify individuals or households maybe?

I'm not sure we can generally find a solution to this besides optionally not tracking it at all (which breaks real time map only). If I see this correct only the real time map uses this info. Maybe the real time map could be changed to work like the regular visitor map and not use long/lat?

I'm not sure, but it looks like the visitor map converts a city to a lat/long pair, so this might be do-able pretty easily... still checking though

@tsteur nvm, that uses the tracked longitude/latitude. Probably easiest is to somehow map locations to longitude/latitude, otherwise I think we'd have to change the realtime map significantly. It's probably fairly simple to write a script to iterate over every location in the geoip database and set a lat/long in a file.

I'd say that for their own reasons, it's always in the geolocation DB providers interest to not provide more accurate lat/long.

geoip says for example https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city

Longitude (Latitude and Longitude are often near the center of population. These values are not precise and should not be used to identify a particular address or household.)

As a possible fix maybe we could always set the last 3 digits to zero if that's what maxmind does (in case they change it in the future)?

I reckon in this case for now we maybe don't need to do anything and if someone wants to use some more accurate provider then they can do this.

The problem would still remain with rounding etc if locations where only few people live but I suppose they would also be maybe assigned to a bigger nearby city (would need to be checked).