unknownj

I have to say, I'm impressed. My home IP address is static and resolves cleanly to webley.demon.co.uk. No hint of location in the host name, you'll notice. All the Geo data websites I've looked at thus far just narrow the location down to United Kingdom. Some think it's from Northamptonshire, which it is not.

So then, how is it that I got some very targeted advertising when browsing last night?

According to an advertisement, there were two "attractive" ladies "waiting for me", in my very village! Now I know this to be a lie, since firstly there are no attractive ladies in my village, and secondly all the ladies that might think they would qualify would have been down at the park drinking White Lightning anyway.

Nevertheless, somehow they mapped from the IP address to my specific village. That can't be guesswork, and it can't be derived from the IP itself, so surely they have collected this information somehow. At some point, some form has been filled out by some member of my family, and the combination of an IP address and a town/postcode has been sold on for more effective targeted marketing.

I can't say I'm too sad about that. While I have no need for the ladies in question, and have no reason to suspect that such women have ever existed in my local area, it feels nice to know that the Internet is trying to lie to me on as personalised a level as possible - on a real one-to-one basis. I may just be an IP address, but I am no longer just a number.