BigDataCloud Blog

Big tech, or more precisely Ad tech, companies have been heavily criticised for exploiting users’ personal data to serve targetted ads for promoting brands, services and products. The rampant buying and selling of users’ personal data and excessive use of the data have degraded the reputation of big tech companies. For example, the total GDPR fines imposed in Q3 2021 were 20 times greater than for Q1 and Q2 2021 combined reaching nearly €1 billion. The companies included Google, Amazon, Facebook, Whatsapp and others.

Learn how you can implement our new free client-side reverse geocoding API to know where your website visitors or mobile app users are coming from. Using this approach, when the HTML5 geolocation API fails to retrieve the user’s location, you can call the same API without passing any geo-coordinates and it will automatically fallback to BigDataCloud’s patent-pending next-generation IP geolocation technology.

The reverse geocoding API is widely used by businesses to identify their customer’s or asset’s location by converting their geographical coordinates into a readable address. But how reliable is it, and what are its limitations? Every day we use maps on our mobile phones to commute, find local businesses, discover new exciting places, and get localised news and media content.

This article addresses the fundamentals of IP Geolocation and then explains the best accuracy and outcomes we can theoretically expect out of ‘perfect’ IP Geolocation. It then outlines conceptual limitations we should be aware of, and to what extent we can trust the data we receive. The goal of this article is not to compare different IP Geolocation providers.

Though anonymising IP addresses provides privacy and some level of security to the users, this is often exploited by scammers, hackers and fraudsters to carry out malicious activities. Hence, it is of great importance for businesses to detect such connections and flag them for further investigation. Imagine being able to detect fraudulent clicks and nullify the transaction, it would save millions to brands and add value to the business.

There are many reverse geocoding service providers with various features and pricing models. Among them, Google has the most popular reverse geocoding API and is known to lead the industry. Upon in-depth research, you will find that these APIs have a lot of restrictions that impact the scalability and speed of your apps. In this blog post, we have highlighted the major advantages of BigDataCloud’s reverse geocoding API, over Google’s API, and a few other well-known service providers’ APIs.