It’s americans assuming everything must be about the US and everyone they’re talking to understands US terms or even is from there.

Like using state acronyms with no context and assuming ppl will know what it means. Or random cardinal directions when there’s no country context. The whole thing likely exists because of the insane cultural bubble US education and media perpetuates combined with many people on the english speaking internet actually being from there.

Oh and also many of the people on reddit complaining about it were utterly unable to see when there was context implying it’s about the US so they weren’t really better.

That, or a photo of your ID, or some other “proof”. Depends on country too probably.

Honestly I don’t think there’s any relevant data google would gain from that that they don’t already have unless you’re very meticulous about not letting them have any, so I didn’t really care.

And you can almost certainly blame “think of the children” type of legislation for that more than google trying to collect more data. Which is also what causes the country variation, it might not be needed at all in some places.