This obviously assumes you disable mobile data and only have WiFi enabled. I’ve seen it on my smart phone when I turn on my VPN it shows that my IP address is at the selected location but my weather app still shows me at my real location.
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The vpn hides you location from others you communicate over the internet with.
You internet providers will give you an internet address whenever you connect to the internet. This is necessary so that others on the internet can send you stuff. You tell a server like reddit.com that you want to see a website and it sends you that page to the address.
You need an IP address to use the internet so your ISP will give you one whenever you connect to the internet.
However the ISP will hand out the same addresses in the same location each time.
People on the internet have collected list of all the IP addresses and where they are used.
These list can be used by others to personalize advertisement and allow and deny access.
They can show you adds about single women near you or deny you access to content forbidden in your location.
Netflix will be able to look at your IP address and for example tell that this is an IP address given out by a French ISP in France and only show you content that they have the rights to show people in France.
When you use a VPN you basically have a trusted party that you use as a middleman to pass messages on. You don’t ask for websites directly you ask someone else to ask for you and they pass the result back to you.
If that someone is located in England and you are in France and you go to netflix, they will show you the content available in England instead of France.
This is a way to “disguise” your location by hiding your IP-address.
However when your phone wants to find out where it is, it doesn’t use any of that stuff. Your phone uses GPS to figure out where it is.
This information is usually just available to the phone and whichever app you allow it to have. It makes sense to allow a map app or a weather app to have access to your location. It makes less sense for many other apps that might ask for it.
If you allow some weather app to have direct access to your location information it will use that rather than the less exact info about where you are based on your IP.
Hiding you IP-address is not useful if you turn around and then given them the exact coordinates of where you are.
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