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Country Determination Without Using IP Addresses

How does Sealmetrics determine the country without IP addresses?​

Sealmetrics uses the timezone configured in the user's browser to determine the country of origin for each event ("hit"), instead of looking up the IP address. The timezone is mapped to a country through an internal IANA table, which yields an approximate, aggregate-level geographic estimate without processing IP addresses or collecting personal identifiers.

1. Retrieving the Timezone​

The browser exposes the timezone value through standard APIs such as:

Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone

Examples of possible values include:\

  • Europe/Madrid\
  • America/Santiago\
  • Asia/Tokyo

This information is provided directly by the user's device through the standard Intl.DateTimeFormat API and does not contain identifiable data, nor does it allow individual tracking.

2. How is a timezone mapped to a country?​

Each timezone is matched against an internal table connecting IANA timezones to the countries that use them.

  • For unique timezones (e.g., Asia/Tokyo), the country is determined with high confidence.\
  • For shared timezones (e.g., Europe/Paris), the system selects the most likely country based on majority usage or internal statistical criteria.

The resulting estimation is accurate enough for aggregated analytics and attribution metrics, although it cannot guarantee absolute precision in every case.

3. Privacy & Compliance​

This approach fully adheres to privacy and data-minimization principles:

  • No IP lookup is involved in country determination — not for analytics reports, and not for anything else. (A country-by-IP signal was designed for the Agent Analytics bot detector, but that feature is not live and cannot be enabled, so no such lookup runs on any account. See What We Track.)\
  • No persistent device identifiers are stored.\
  • Timezone information does not identify the user.\
  • Country calculation relies solely on the timezone provided by the browser, never on the IP address.

Thanks to this method, Sealmetrics can offer meaningful geographic insights while preserving user privacy and operating without requiring consent for tracking.

In short
  • Country comes from the browser timezone (Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone) mapped against an IANA timezone table — no IP lookup is involved.
  • Unique timezones (e.g. Asia/Tokyo) resolve with high confidence; shared timezones (e.g. Europe/Paris) resolve to the most likely country, so precision is country-level only.
  • No persistent device identifiers are stored and the timezone does not identify the user, which is why this geo data needs no consent.
Written and maintained by the Sealmetrics Team