Google knows where I live not because of what I search for, but by my IP address? Obviously it's more than just Google then.
It is indeed. I was going to reply to your initial message about this (but was ninjaed, as I am now, but I'm making a different point, so there..!), and tell you that
I'm often picked up as living
two cities over from where I actually am, so don't take it so personally.
Depending on the kinds of things I'm being targetted by, for any given web-page, I can get "find <fast food outlets/electronics stores/girls/boys/whatever> in
OtherCity, now!" stuff, or obviously 'personalised generic' ads about.. well, in that case, usually
girls... in my specific area. Except that it's not my area, but twenty miles or so over. With my locale being the biggest city in the immediate region, the one The Internet thinks I'm in being
perhaps larger than the one in-between us (depending on how you measure it), but the ISP I'm going through obviously routes traffic from me with an assigned IP address that is based (or has been wrongly
identified as being based, due to prior configuration or confirming against someone else who
was over there) in this other place.
And, as such, I'm happy to ignore it. Just like I'd be ignoring it anyway, but just like the Phishing email purporting to be from a bank that one doesn't use, it's more an amusement than the immediate concern that a correctly-guessing geolocation would have meant.
Obviously you seem to be (perhaps more by good luck, on their part, than good management, but maybe also due to more geographic homogeneity which means that it's not
going to be wrong in the same way) getting spookily accurate ads, but I'm betting that you don't need to worry at all.
As
has been said, by you and quinnr, some proxying tool or other dislocation device might sort you out there, but I also think that it'd be more trouble than it's worth, unless both You're Paranoid and They
Are After You, in which case you've got other things to worry about.
(Nice t-shirt, BTW. But you need to tidy up your desk a bit. Boy, did I LOL when I saw that last thing you downloaded! Getting even more paranoid yet?
)
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Topic: What does google think of you? (Read 12333 times)