How do these advertisers know where I am?

[jjimm]

I get those dreadful ads too, and they always offer me girls in Ipswich. A bit icky considering what happened in Ipswich recently.

Also, the girls in those ads are SO not English.

[Dervorin]

@Colophon

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.

How do they do that, then?

I can’t help thinking that if they’re going to go to all the trouble of looking up your IP, they should at least make a pretense of tailoring names and photographs to your location. It’s deeply unconvincing when I’m at home and “Claire, 21, Bangalore” is a Scandinavian blonde who’s apparently dying to meet me.

Maybe anyone daft enough to click on those ads won’t be fooled by a minor detail such as this, though.

[Keeve]

@Shagnasty

Click on this site to see for yourself: http://www.ip-adress.com/

Mine’s off by only about 6 miles.