Good Old Games ends IP-based location tracking

Digital download site Good Old Games has announced that it will no longer determine customer locations via their IP address, due to privacy concerns and flaws with that system.
Before this change, the country-specific offers shown on the GoG page would be determined by the visitor’s IP address. This will no longer be the case, says managing director Guillaume Rambourg: “We’ve come to the conclusion that there are a number of issues with using a customer’s IP address to determine what offer they are being presented with from GOG.com. A good number of users can find themselves negatively impacted by a policy of using geo IP to set their region.”
Rambourg then explains that problems arise for users wishing to purchase or download games while travelling, and that in any case IP addresses are not always a reliable indicator of location.
Privacy is a concern too, and it’s surely not a coincidence (in light of PSN events) that Rambourg has taken this opportunity to generate some positive PR and state: “Effective privacy protections for our users means that any data that we don’t need to collect, we shouldn’t.”
GoG will now trust its users to set their own locations accurately, by updating “Account & Settings” in “My Account” on the Good Old Games site.