How do those ads know where I live?

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very
useful leo
my best regards

very useful leo
i appreciate that
my best regards

Wow, that's some scary stuff!

The fact that the word "cookie" and likely the word "Amazon.com" were'nt mentioned suggests to me that the author might well have done a bit more research before "answering" this baffling queston.

uhhh, cookies anyone? check out your cookie cache - you'll see various ad engines set cookies. they only have to know you once to track you from there. it isn't hard. Philip Greenspun wrote about this back in, oh, 1997 or so: http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/user-tracking (that page has since been updated).

So what's your point Blake? You say other websites get to read the Amazon.com cookie? Since the web browsers submits the cookie only to the site it belongs too this can't be happening (at least in a computer that hasn't been hijacked by some sort of adware/malware)

And if you say Amazon.com is illegally selling private info to relate personal data and IP address how would this guys (Amazon.com) make sure every pal behind an IP is the same guy they recorded the info once when we all get different IPs assigned randomly when we reset our routers?

I agree with Balke. Very poorly researched article. Like someone with a few extra minutes in hand decided to write quickly about something he had very pedastrian knowledge to begin with.

Cookies,Cookies is real suspect!

I wonder if they may be using the same technique google uses to geo target users: First response to DNS query. Typing www.google.com in the address bar is translated to www.google.ca (canadian location) Geo position ad farms and the first response wins. Usually this means that the nearest to the user reponds with a local server address, and thus local versions of the ads.

Another thing to keep in mind is that often times they don't know where you live. I noticed that banner ads on dictionary.com were targeting my location. When I deleted my cookies and went back it had a classmates.com add to find students from "West Springfield High School" or "Martin Luther King High School". There just so happens to be a "West Springfield" high school in my area, but there are also 5 zillion West Springfields and Martin Luther Kings all over the US.

So sometimes they just guess with a common city name or something.

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