How can a page know where I am and know nearby cities?

[Belfour]

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled cross an Internet page by mistake. My intention was to check for images for iTunes, but landed on a page with other things. The page had advertisement on the left of the page, and what struck me was that the ads had written down a nearby city. My question is: how can a page know where I am and know nearby cities?

Belfour

[redwudz]

They read your IP address and associated that with a location. Fairly common.

And Belfour, in the future please use a more descriptive subject title in your posts to allow others to search for similar topics. I will change yours this time. From our rules:

Try to choose a subject that describes your topic.
Please do not use topic subjects like Help me!!! or Problems.

Thanks,
Moderator redwudz

[Belfour]

Sorry mate,

I will behave next time..

[thecoalman]

They do it through geolocation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolocation

If you went through a proxy server across the country they'd list the location of the proxy server instead of you.

[AlanHK]

Eg, see http://www.ip2location.com/

[SLK001]

Remote mind reading. Very common.

[Seeker47]

They do it through geolocation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolocation

If you went through a proxy server across the country they'd list the location of the proxy server instead of you.

It can be downright creepy . . . or at least kind of annoying. Any other block alternatives, besides using a proxy ? There must be like 5,000 FireFox extensions, so I wouldn't be too surprised if they had some counters against this.

[redwudz]

Well, remember they don't know who you are, just where your listed ISP is located. Some ISP addresses have many, many users. AOL seems to be like that. But outside of a proxy server that actually changes your ISP address, I don't know of a way to prevent ISP IDs.

More of a problem is a cookie that can identify you individually to a site, if you gave the site that information. But cookies are easy to block or delete.

[jagabo]

It can be downright creepy . . . or at least kind of annoying. Any other block alternatives, besides using a proxy ?

No. For them to respond to any request to read a web page they must know where to send the data. That's either your IP address or the IP address of a proxy server acting on your behalf.

[Seeker47]

Well, remember they don't know who you are, just where your listed ISP is located. Some ISP addresses have many, many users. AOL seems to be like that.

I'm sure it makes a big difference whether you have a fixed IP (most people don't), vs a dynamic one that changes regularly as the session lease expires.

But outside of a proxy server that actually changes your ISP address, I don't know of a way to prevent ISP IDs.

There seem to be many pages worth of potential hits yielded by my quick search, and I don't have time to sift through them just now, but for example I saw this one:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3239

There must be several more. I expect most of them will be doing some variation of the proxy thing.