this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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The original was posted on /r/homelab by /u/kingdigabe on 2025-07-26 00:01:56+00:00.


Last week I was visiting family in Trinidad and used Tailscale to VPN back into my home network in Canada. I set my home network as an exit node so I could:

  • Access LAN services remotely (not exit node related I know)
  • Watch region-specific content (YouTube Premium without ads or restrictions)

Everything worked great at the time.

Fast forward to today. I’m back home in Canada, freshly reformatted my laptop, clean-installed Firefox, and set the homepage to www.google.com.

Weirdly, I noticed that Google shows "Trinidad and Tobago" in the lower-left corner of the search page. When I searched "my IP" on Google, it says:

"Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago"

...which is exactly where I was staying.

Here's the kicker:

My IP geolocation on whatismyipaddress.com and other services shows Toronto, Canada

Multiple devices on my LAN show this problem (including ones that never left the country). It even persists in incognito mode

Because YouTube/Google thinks I am in Trinidad, YouTube Premium on my iPhone/iPad has missing features like background play, even though I’m now at home on a Canadian ISP

So it looks like Google has poisoned its own geolocation database and now thinks my Canadian public IP address is in Trinidad.

Don't get me started dealing with Youtube Premium technical support. Despite providing all of the evidence of Geolocation issues in the google servers, they have me rebooting my iPhone, reinstalling YouTube, checking if I have the "Background Play" toggle to "always on"... frustrating....

Not really asking for solutions... I know what the two potential solutions are:

  1. Google fix their geolocation database for my public IP. I've been asking them to look into this for days now, they keep responding with: reboot your phone.
  2. Change my public IP. Doable but not that simple. When I try to release my IP on my OpenWRT router and renew, I get the same public IP address because my MAC address is the same. I could change my MAC address or change my WAN card (its USB Ethernet) on my raspi4 openWRT router. I'm currently not running any services that need a static public IP, but what if I were? I would be forced to change my IP and related services because of a clearly Google problem.

I will give Youtube Premium support one more change to fix my issue before I change my public IP. But if they respond once again with: reboot or reinstall...

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