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·4 min read

Country without city: geo that does not become an address

The IP is used for a country — and optionally a region — then discarded. City is off by default. Precision is not the same as insight.

PrivacyGeo

An unlabeled topographic map and a closed brass compass
A country is a breakdown. A city is often a person.

Geo is the feature that quietly turns a privacy-first tool back into a locator. A city plus a time plus a rare user agent is enough to be unkind. Vector 5 looks up country and region, then drops the IP. City is an explicit opt-in, documented in the manifest, off in the default.

That is enough for “EU vs US this week” and “Germany moved after the launch.” It is not enough for a heat map of a neighbourhood. We will not add one.

  • IP used once: hash + geo. Never stored.
  • Region is coarse. City is optional.
  • Crawler hits can still show a country without implying a person lives there.
If a geo report could find someone, it is not a geo report.