When assessing a website for GDPR compliance, the country of data processing plays an important role. Processing outside the EU is only permitted if an adequate level of data protection is guaranteed. There are therefore EU "adequacy decisions" for a number of countries; in the case of the USA, there is one for companies that are certified under the "EU-US Data Privacy Framework".
It is therefore sometimes necessary to determine the location of the web server or which company carries out the hosting - from which the location of the data processing can be derived.
A solution such as decareto Compliance Monitoring determines this automatically. However, there is also a completely free option, which we demonstrate below.
Determine location by IP address
As soon as the IP address is known, this information can be determined free of charge, as the location and hosting company for an IP address can be queried in publicly accessible databases. In our example, we check the website ambergroup.io.
The IP address can be read out using the browser's developer tools:
Open the Chrome browser and right-click in the content area. Click the menu item "Inspect". The developer tools open in the lower section of the window.
Click on the "Network" tab in the developer tools and then open the website. You will see a whole series of network requests listed: at the top of the list is the HTML page, followed by resources (images, stylesheets, Javascript libraries, etc.) that are referenced by the page.
Scroll to the top and right-click in the heading row of the table. In the menu that opens, select "Remote Address".
An additional column is now displayed which shows the IP address for each network request in the list (in this case 104.18.37.103, the suffix :443 can be ignored )
Retrieve location information on the IP address
There are a large number of websites that allow location data to be read out free of charge. We recommend the site ip-api.com. Enter the IP address there.
The search result will show that the server location is Toronto and the operating company is "Cloudflare Inc.". This is the operator of a "Content Delivery Network", i.e. an infrastructure that caches websites and thus makes them faster and more scalable. If a company name such as "IONOS SE" were to appear instead of Cloudflare, this would be an example of hosting in a data center.
Author: Eckhard Schneider
