this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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As someone who jumps between the US and Canada (since on the border) I've found that, Amazon will block purchases from Canada to the US and visa versa, it doesn't care about ip, it uses your accounts region, Canada and US have seperate regions in your account settings that you need to do. Sadly this means you would need two different accounts. One for CA and one for US. It's likely the same deal with audible
Audible and Amazon accounts are the same. I have an AU account and a US account. But I’m only using the US account to buy the audiobook in the US store, using VPN and private browsing. No CC or similar involved.
But from Australia. So how does Amazon know I’m in Australia?!
From a privacy point-of-view I thought VPN masks such things. I’m trying to understand how Amazon is detecting my physical country.
Aside from device ID, or maybe if you're using a billing address as something from Australia, I can't see how they would be, you've stated location services are off, VPN will mask the ip.
I didn't even need to use a VPN in my cases between Canada and the US, changing to an account that was in the region that allowed the purchase was all I had to do.
That being said if I changed my Canada account to use the billing address of my US residence instead of my Canadian residence when on the Canadian region, I would get region locked I found, so if you have a primary payment method on file using your AU address you could try temporarily removing or modifying it to have a different address
Nah the CC and billing address for my US account are fully local there. My AU and US accounts are totally seperate and everything is local for each.
I’ve tried both using their apps on my phone and the browser (Safari with privacy relay) with the same result (with VPN etc etc).
I agree, I can’t se how they’re doing this. Must be something I’ve overlooked. Or some new internet black magic they’re employing.
EDIT: Or the search result for the book I want isn’t actually available in the USA and they’ve just messed that up (since I’m searching from the US as far as they can see). I guess I could try buying a different book
yea that was my next question, if the title was actually available in the country selected, I had that issue with Netflix searches constantly