How can I change the location of my IP address?
My IP address says someplace in Virginia. How do I change it to Illinois, where I reside?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: change IP address
Assuming you're referring to remote web sites trying to locate you via your IP address (like https://www.whatismyip.com/ ), you have very little control over this.
There are a couple of different ways IP geolocation works. None of them are ways the end user has direct control over.
The first way is that the 'owner' of the IP address (i.e. your ISP) can publish data about where any given IP address is. For example, an ISP may say all their IP addresses are in a certain town, regardless of where the actual end-user is.
The second method is via heuristics where the remote site can trace back the path to your IP address and infer location based on known points.
The third (and most common) is that the site uses a third party company which maintains a database of known IP addresses based on a combination of methods 1 and 2 above. Sites can subscribe to this data to save them having to do the legwork themselves. Sites such as https://ipgeolocation.io/what-is-my-ip and https://www.iplocation.net/ (amongst others) are examples.
Either way, you don't have direct control over this data (unless you have your own private IP address block and control the reverse DNS data for that block).
It's also worth noting that the remote site can only see your public address. This means that if you're using a VPN, private relay, or other obfuscation service, the site will see the address of that site, not your system, which can further complicate things.
In the early days, VPNs were most often used to connect remote systems to a secure corporate network so if you were working from home, for example, you could access resources in the office without the company having to expose those resources to the entire world. The side effect of this is that all your traffic flows to the office (or, more specifically, to the VPN server), and that's the IP address that the rest of the world would see. Therefore it would look like you were connecting from the office even though you're sitting on your couch at home.
Nowadays, people also use VPNs to mask their location (sometimes for legitimate reasons, sometimes not). The fact that remote sites see the VPN server's address and not the end-user can have some advantages (and disadvantages).
Without knowing more of your setup, whether you're using a VPN, private relay, proxy server, or some such, it isn't clear how much of the above applies to you. Suffice to say you don't have direct control over your IP address' geolocation data, and limited control over what IP address other people see.
