We’ve all seen the ubiquitous “hot single girls in your area are just dying to meet a no-marks like YOU!!” adverts cluttering up otherwise useful sites. But in the past few months they seem to have become, if not cleverer exactly, a couple of degrees less dumb. You still get the same generic photographs of the sort of hot single girls who are of course queuing up to meet internet addicts, only nowadays they are captioned “Claire, 21, Wokingham” or “Alison, 19, Aldershot” etc, with the names of towns within 10 miles of my home.
Well I had thought of that, but would my IP address really be THAT specific? I use a UK-wide cable broadband provider, and it seems like I get a different IP address each time I shut down the cable modem.
The IP address is how they do it. It doesn’t always work and it is common for it to be off by a few miles but it generally does fine which is good enough for advertisers.
Yeah but the first numbers stay within a certain range. First byte gives your country - second is usually ISP spesific (each ISP has a limited range) the third and fourth bytes are for more spesific locations. Your ISP has a pool of IP adresses assigned to each area of the country, and therefore it is possible to make a fairly accurat guess as to your location most of the time.
Have a look at http://www.ip-adress.com/ to see what location your current IP is pointing at. (Mine is off by about 15 KM at the moment)
I have a country house that is not far from a very small town. When I fire up the computer up there I get the pictures of the hot babes showing their stuff. The name of the “city” underneath the name is the small town I refered to.
I’m thinking, “There must be a huge whorehouse in this town that I’m not aware of. I have never seen this many hot babes around this place, yet if they are there, they’ve ALL decided to pose nude and beg for action. Amazing!”
Another possibility is that you typed in the name of your town on some web site and a cookie was stored with this information in such a way that the singles sites can access it. Try clearing all cookies from your web browser and seeing what happens.
But I have used other IP locating tools that point to a location with a few miles of my house. Like Proxify or the locate me function on Microsoft’s live.com. Although, I just tried I few other online tools that I founf through google, and a few of them returned the right IP address but the wrong physical location.
My Verizon FiOS service at home used to give me New York targeted ads. Now it’s for my area (Beaverton, OR). Sometimes it switches back, though it hasn’t done so in a while, so I suspect cookies are also involved.
So, it’s the IP, maybe cookies, and the ceiling cat watching you.
As long as we’re fighting some ignorance here… no, this is not how it works. The divisions are much more arbitrary than that. For example, here are about 50 instances where the first byte indicates a particular large corporation or other organization: List of assigned /8 IPv4 address blocks - Wikipedia. Linked articles there discuss how the space is divided.
This happens to me too, on occasion. Most of the time the girl ads says simple “YOUR TOWN.” But every once in a while they say these dames are from Bumblefuck, Kansas. And I’m in Minnesota.
