Does Benecaster collect location data from my subscribers?

Benecaster looks up the country and region (state/province) of each feed access request using a locally-installed geographic database (MaxMind GeoLite2-City). The raw IP address is discarded immediately after the lookup — only the country code and region code are stored on your server. City, postal code, and precise coordinates are never extracted.

IP-based geolocation has inherent limitations worth knowing about. Country-level accuracy is generally reliable, but region/state accuracy is lower. Subscribers using a VPN will show the VPN server’s location rather than their own. Mobile subscribers may show a location tied to their carrier’s regional hub rather than where they actually are. These are constraints of the approach, not gaps in how Benecaster implements it — any tool that infers location from IP addresses faces the same limitations.

This geographic data stays on your server. If you’ve opted in to telemetry, aggregate country/region counts are included in the telemetry payload — not individual subscriber locations, just totals by region.