They know where I live! (how?)

corblimey

Ive been away from the 'net' for a while, and reacquainting myself with some of the more downmarket sites at the weekend, I noticed that somehow, there are a couple of banner text ads that locate me in Cork.

One was a horny housewife who claimed she lived in "Cork, Cork". Another offered to hook me up with a blond nympho in "Cork". These were US sites, so there's no way they were actually from Cork (the "Cork, Cork" is a bit of a giveaway anyway). I can't think where these settings are coming from, or how the sites are grabbing them. It's possible I filled in a form somewhere many moons ago, but that's unlikely, and this is a fairly recent development.

Anyone know how this was done?

mp3guy

you'd be suprised what your connection is broadcasting, your IP, your OS, your location, your ISP

Shrimp

Exactly... It's just a lil script which they run in the background! Marketing Strategy

aidan_walsh

mp3guy wrote:

you'd be suprised what your connection is broadcasting, your IP, your OS, your location, your ISP

You've been reading those banner ads, haven't you...

zynaps

Heh

IP-to-location services have been getting popular for a while, and you can see why marketing slime want to use it wherever possible - though in this case, it's totally fakey, as opposed to the usual "offer a real product that is somehow relevant to that area" approach.

I wouldn't worry too much about your machine broadcasting who you are, what colour cacks you wear and what your ATM pin number is, though.

corblimey

mp3guy wrote:

you'd be suprised what your connection is broadcasting, your IP, your OS, your location, your ISP

Right, but location from where? AFAIK, I use Cork, Cork sparingly when asked for location on boards like this one. More usually, I put Cork, Ireland, and I can't think of anywhere that I've put Cork, Cork as a setting on my machine (especially since I didn't live in Cork when I bought it).

I understand it's a setting somewhere, but it's interesting to me how it's achieved (the tech side of it)

zynaps

They probably have it set up for American states, like...
"Pittsburgh, PA" - as we don't have the same address format, their program probably returned city: "Cork" and state: "Cork" as it didn't know any better.

[edit]
Ahh, no. Disregard what he said - they would have guessed your location from your IP address, that's all.

Have a look at this and put in some IP addresses.

Winters

corblimey wrote:

One was a horny housewife who claimed she lived in "Cork, Cork". Another offered to hook me up with a blond nympho in "Cork".

Simple solution is to stop visiting porn sites.

Capt'n Midnight

Unlikley - but possible...
Is your address filled in in Microsoft Office etc. cos then it goes into the
registry somewhere to be handed out..
If you have setup your modem then 021 would probably appear in DUN somewhere.

Or you may have enterend your details on the interweb somewhere..
Unless you use mispelllings of your name it's hard to say where they got it from..

nahdoic

StatCounter.com uses a geolocation database -the entire IP address range can be mapped to different cities. it is not 100% accurate - but it is very accurate a lot of the time. Cork and Dublin would come up on it often.

in the database the state would come up as "Cork" and the city would also come up as "Cork" which would give you to the Cork, Cork - which they hoped would comeup as Houston, Texas or whatever.

I wouldn't be worrying about it.

yossarin

Winters wrote:

Simple solution is to stop visiting porn sites.

the cure is worse the the disease !

scojones

What has this got to do with programming?

zynaps

Winters wrote:

Simple solution is to stop visiting porn sites.

Hmm. No, I don't think I'll be doing that.

mp3guy

heres an example of something like that:

corblimey

sjones wrote:

What has this got to do with programming?

Well, if it could be used for good, rather than evil (like, off the top of my head, targetted advertising: okay, so still rather evil) and somebody here knew how it was done, then it could be construed as programming, software development, html, javascript, whatever.
Er... is this not the right place for that? I'll get me coat.

I'm still a little perturbed by where the information is held, but it must be somewhere on my machine, I just thought it was interesting, is all. Pr0n sites seem to do all the clever marketing shiznit first.

zynaps

corblimey wrote:

I'm still a little perturbed by where the information is held, but it must be somewhere on my machine, I just thought it was interesting, is all. Pr0n sites seem to do all the clever marketing shiznit first.

Why don't people listen?
It's not because your machine is telling them where you live - when you make a connection to their web server to download things, it passes your IP address through a IP-to-location service they probably pay for.

This is just a huge database of which IP ranges belong to who and roughly where they're located.

Again. Not your PC actually telling them that you live in Cork.

corblimey

zynaps wrote:

Why don't people listen?
It's not because your machine is telling them where you live - when you make a connection to their web server to download things, it passes your IP address through a IP-to-location service they probably pay for.

This is just a huge database of which IP ranges belong to who and roughly where they're located.

Again. Not your PC actually telling them that you live in Cork.

Right, right, sorry, Zynaps. I actually read your reply then got sidetracked by Winters telling me to stop visiting porn sites. I had to go lie down for a while and forgot all about you.

And you even had the decency to include an interesting link.

Gandhi

I get the same thing too, even though I live in the States now. Such is the beauty of the rich, musical Cork accent, that its lilting tones come through the keyboard and dance across the 'net when you type...

This has become more popular since the release of "langer.class", which allows any Java applet to detect a Cork accent remotely.

Wouldn' dowtcha, bhoy!!!

darraghrogan

I was playing Quake 3 recently and one of the online games had a flag for everyone. Said I was in Ireland - correct. Said I was crap as well - not far off the mark there!

Darragh