I live in Baltimore. When I go to a website the site will often say things like "find sexy singles in Baltimore," and stuff like that. I use spyware software religiously. So how do they know where I live? And how do I get rid of it. These aren't local websites I'm visiting by the way.
Spooky, isn't it? I see the same thing when I visit certain websites. It's not always about "sexy singles", but they frequently nail me down to the Seattle area.
There are a couple of ways this can happen.
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The most obvious is one we often overlook.
Ever register with a site? I'll bet at a minimum it required a city, state or postal code. Well, you just told them where you are. That's now information that that site, and possibly other sites operated by the same entity or entities, can use to customize your experience. Including local news, weather, and advertising.
The spooky one is where you visit a site for the first time, and up pop those ads for your city.
As I've discussed on other articles, it's nearly impossible to physically locate a specific computer based on only its IP address. The reason is that the publicly available information about IP addresses only resolves down to the ISP that assigned it. If you need to get more detailed, you need the ISP's help.
But, without the ISP's help, you do have something. You have the location of the ISP.
In fact, that's exactly how I get located when I'm at home. Even though I'm located well outside of Seattle, my ISP is based there. Hence ads that use "geo-targeting" based on the IP address resolve to the greater Seattle area.
They can get it wrong, too. The most egregious are cases where they attempt to geo-target an AOL customer. Do a lookup on AOL's IP range, and it "looks like" every AOL customer lives in Manassas, Virginia, regardless of where they really are.
The reality for most lies somewhere in between. As I said, AOL looks like it all originates in one location. Smaller ISPs can typically be located down to the primary metropolitan area that they serve. Some ISPs allocate blocks of IP addresses to specific geographic regions, so that while the ISP might be national, the IP addresses can be geo-targeted to a more specific region. In your case, looking up the IP address you posted from on http://whois.arin.net shows that it's part of a block of IPs that Comcast has allocated to the Baltimore area.
So the bottom line is that advertisers can often, though not always, make a reasonably intelligent guess as to your general location. It's nothing new really, and certainly nothing to be concerned about.
Related:
Ask Leo! - What can people tell from my IP address?
Ask Leo! - How do I figure out who owns an IP address?
Ask Leo! - Can I get someone's name and address from their IP address?
Article C2550 - February 10, 2006
"I use spyware software religiously" That's the reason...
Ok, Ok... I guess what he really meant was antispyware.
Posted by: Mikywutz at March 28, 2006 10:27 AMOkay, dumb comment people. His answer is accurate and the logical place to start. Once the adserver resolves a close approximation of your location this information can be included in a cookie. If the adserver is part of a network like Advertising.com or Revenue Science it can fine tune depending on the sites your frequent. So if this guy looks at the Baltimore Sun site and checks the local job postings the server can give the Baltimore location in the cookie another point. This will help validate the association. You can get a lot more sophisticated but starting from this base is all you need. No nefarious plots between Amazon.com and any other advertiser. Sheesh, take off your foil hats.
Posted by: vitriolic1 at September 11, 2006 5:56 PMI think the article is right about it locating the ISP I got ads for nacogdoches, an unusual name, when
Posted by: J at January 30, 2007 4:03 PMI just started using the computer there, there is no other way the could have done this besides the ip ranges. I might look for a good proxy server to see if it counters their technique, which it should.
Probably they are using a database with IP's associated to regions/cities, you can find information about IP addresses too using http://www.ipgp.net
Posted by: Lucian at February 10, 2007 12:27 PMWhil using a proxy (e.g. hidemyass.com) you will get a defauly banner ad and not one labeling you city.
Case in point:
Posted by: Anonymous at March 7, 2007 3:58 PMThere is one of those "cam-whore" banner ads that show the model with a piece of paper says "I love ". Viewed through a proxy the same piece of paper says "I love my town". Kinda cool!
explore this little geo address locator:
Posted by: Raman at November 27, 2007 9:32 AMhttp://excathedra.net/Resource/Programming/GeoAddress.aspx
How about: http://www.ip-adress.com/
Posted by: J. Doe at December 18, 2007 12:53 PMUsing your IP information... pretty damn close I would say.
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Oh yeah, only *300 MILES* off for me.
Sorry, but these services are simple NOT reliable and RARELY lead people close
enough to you home for anything significant.
Leo
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I don't think anyone here really knows what they are talking about. When I go on a site for the first time, the ads mention the exact town where I live. My ISP is located over 500 miles from me so the ads are not locking onto my ISP, they know where I am. How is this possible? I saw similar on a chat room where a guests info would include their location and I used to freak people out by guessing correctly where they were, I did't think about privacy at that time. There must be a way to block your info.
Posted by: LaurieP at April 12, 2008 3:04 PMI don't think anyone here really knows what they are talking about. When I go on a site for the first time, the ads mention the exact town where I live. My ISP is located over 500 miles from me so the ads are not locking onto my ISP, they know where I am. How is this possible? I saw similar on a chat room where a guests info would include their location and I used to freak people out by "guessing" correctly where they were, I did't think about privacy at that time. There must be a way to block your info.
Posted by: LaurieP at April 12, 2008 3:05 PM