I'm in a somewhat unique position to share my findings about how websites treat users who change their location to another country. While there may be some good legal reasons for not showing content in other countries, as a user who has expressed a valid reason to switch which country they are accessing the site from, you'd expect everything to behave as expected.
Googlemail and hotmail both picked up on the fact I was accessing their sites from ip addresses outside my home countrys' range. With this came a raft of security questions before they would allow me to continue. This was an added peace of mind that some random chinaman wasn't sifting through my personal emails and seeing how many meds I'd been buying on-line. As a result I didn't mind the inconvenience.
Facebook on the other hand seemed to miss the point. After asking me all of the security questions and allowing me access, I changed my current location to a suburb of Sydney, Australia. (A huge milestone by anyone's standards). To my surprise all of the advertising is still UK based. What's more is I'm getting adverts for removal companies and Emigration agents. For more on this see Steve Fenton's Blog http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Blog/Date/201209/Blog/Invasive-Advertising/. Now I'm sure there might be a profile setting somewhere that controls this, but why should I have to change this? My Location should dictate the globalization settings.
Spotify also amused me, I could choose between switching to Australia, or buying a subsciption to allow unlimited travel. I decided I'd do both, but when I came to pay, the only option was to pay in £'s! So for now I've chosen to stick with the free service.
There have been plenty of other sites that seem to have fallen foul of this key element when making a website global. I can understand for companies with a separate .com.au site, but if you're boasting a .com site, at least make sure it works in across countries. (I guess UAT is an expensive undertaking).
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