My location is turned off but lately sites know where I am located as they send ads for my location. Is this because my internet (ethernet hard wired) service is showing my location?
You haven’t given us much to go on.
It could be based on your IP address (which can sometimes be reasonably accurate, and sometimes embarrassingly not). A VPN will combat that.
It can depend on your browser settings. If your browser is configured to leak your location then the browser could additionally get your location using any visible WiFi access points (assuming that your hardware has WiFi).
Within the browser, a web site may be using browser fingerprinting to identify you and then infer your location from that.
Related to that, if you participate in social media at all then that may leak your identity to random web sites and, again, from that your location may be inferred. Using multiple browsers can help to combat that.
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Thank you for the feedback. I am hard wired through Purism mini. My location has never been shared before. I do not use social media. I have a VPN but having trouble getting it set up with PureOs. Only changes is the last update I was asked to do. I do not use wifi.
OK, so if it’s not in operation, sites may be using your public IP address to locate you approximately.
Use something like whatismyip.com and see a) what the IP address is, and b) what the IP location is. Assess how accurate the IP location is relative to your actual location.
Then when you do succeed in getting the VPN set up, repeat that check. If you choose a VPN server in another country then the IP location should suddenly be wildly inaccurate (which is generally what you want), and the IP address should be completely different.
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Just putting it out there but if you did use WiFi then the mere act of having a person visit your house is sufficient to leak your location (well assuming that your visitor uses a spyphone rather than a Librem 5). So if you use WiFi at all, it is all but impossible to avoid leaking your location.