How do advertisements know where i live

The rudimentary form of geo-targeting that obtains its data from your hostname or IP address cannot get anything more than your City, State, Country, and sometimes Zip code. More personal information such as your home address, phone number, name, birth date, age, sex, etc. See our system information script for an example of the type of information a website can get about your computer.

Home Help Internet Internet Help. How does a website or advertisement know where I am? Additional information How do I determine the physical location of an IP address? 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.

Sheesh, take off your foil hats. I think the article is right about it locating the ISP I got ads for nacogdoches, an unusual name, when I 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. Whil using a proxy e. Kinda cool! When I go on a site for the first time, the ads mention the exact town where I live.

How is this possible? There must be a way to block your info. A friend of mine who lives in France found out that someone was trying to access her Yahoo email. To make a long story short, she kept getting a message from Yahoo telling her that an unauthorized connection was made using non secure methods and was therefore refused.

The message also printed the culprit IP address. She is in instance of divorce and the immediate suspicion was that her future-ex-husband was trying to access her private email although she had now changed passwords and taken other security measures.

She sent me the IP address that was rejected. Now, had it been a phone or tablet IP address that was traveling around the world it would have been trickier as you know. It all depends on which server the unit is connected and if it is via static IP or dynamic IP.

However, you will always be able to get the location of the server the phone, tablet or computer is connected to. That can tell you a lot already. If I use a Verizon box to send email, even though I use Yahoo as a mail account, a routing will show the address from my box. You can get quite close that way. Unless of course you involve law enforcement. The point I am making is this: We cannot say it is impossible to track an IP address.

It is possible in some very limited instances and if the person on the other end is not savvy enough to understand how the internet works.

Do I make any sense here? If a hack is serious enough for law enforcement to be involved, they can get the courts to allow them to get ahold of the ISP records and identify the source of the hack.

Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam. Then your data is shared with multiple advertisers who bid to fill the ad space. The winning bid gets to fill the ad slot. Zuboff, the author and professor, argues that companies today are mining private lives the same way they exploit natural resources, turning them into profitable goods.

That change happened so quickly and so secretly, Dr. Zuboff argues, that the public is not equipped to fight back. Kaltheuner agreed. Stuart A. He can be reached at stuart. The New York Times is launching an ongoing examination of privacy. See all Privacy articles. Please upgrade your browser. By Stuart A. The second frame of the ad:. Are you okay with that? An ongoing series. Learn more. Ads in our experiment combined data from many of these sources.