I thought all you tech-savvy webheads would be able to help me with this.

I just went to the New Balance website, looking for stores nearby that carry their shoes, entered ONLY my zip code into their store locator, and was told that there were several stores in the area: each store was listed as being a particular distance from my address!

How the hell do they know my address? I've also come across this on other websites: one place even had banner ads that told me I could meet local singles in OAKLAND, where I just moved!! How the hell did they know this, and how can I prevent them from knowing this?

I'm using the latest Firefox browser (history cleared regularly) with no particular attention paid to my privacy settings or anything else, really...

Halp!

Zip codes are pretty much localised. They can make a guess at your general address with a zip code.

As for your ads, they've either already collected the information from forms you've filled up elsewhere, or they've crossed-referenced your IP address. Reverse DNS. Look it up.

2 things:

* The zip code usually encloses a small area, just a few blocks I think, so they can give you distances more or less accurately.
* There are services like GeoIP which can give you information about the geographical area of the user based on it's IP address. You can use Tor to prevent this particular one.

They are obviously spying on you

Post codes (which are the UK equivalent to zip codes) can pin your address down to a few houses within a particular street. The Post Office has been producing post code directorys for years.

Since the information has long since been computerised and is publically available, a lot of websites make use of this information. For instance, Amazon.co.uk uses it to save customers from the effort of having to type out their WHOLE address.

Not much else can be added to what people have said here. Basicaly they worked out where you live because you told them by givng your zipcode as others have said.

Your IP address can also give away your location.
ISP's are given set ranges of IP addresses that they can then give out to their customers. If you know those IP ranges (they are often freely avalable) and you know what ISP covers what area then you can work out roughly where people are by their IP address. If the ISP only covers a small area like a single city or county then you can narrow down the persons location pretty well just by their IP address.
I beleve this is similar to how GeoIP works.

If you want to make it more difficult for people to find you choose a large country wide ISP (or even an international one) instead of that local one that only covers your city/county/state.

You can also use anonymous proxy servers to hide your IP address. But in my experience you can find that they can break some websites and cause other problems. There's also the problem with trust... "is that proxy really anonymous? or is it capturing everything that I'm looking at?"

On another note, you may have noticed on the web that some people encrypt their e-maill address. EG "someone<AT>somewhere.com" or "someone@<remove this bit>somewhere.com". This is done to defeat the e-mail address harvesting bots that collect e-mail address that can then be sold to e-mail spammers and the like.
I beleve you can also get addons to some forums now that automaticly encrypt any e-mail addresses that get posted.

So, okay. Yet another chapter in the ongoing saga of "I Didn't Realize What I Was Giving Away," begun when young DoomMunky promised a girl that he loved her, continued when he began to purchase twelve-packs of beer with some regularity, and most recently expanded when he thought, "I'll just fire up Silent Storm for a bit; it can't eat up that much of my time..."



Thanks for all the info, guys. I'm never using the internet again.

You mean THEY know you play Silent Storm? Didn't you ever wonder why the fanfic forum there was so empty? Run for it now while there's still time

You probably don't have that much privacy in real life when it comes to that, so don't worry too much. The UK has more CCTV cameras per head of population than any other country, including North Korea. I suspect that the USA is a close second.

I personally refuse to have anything to do with store loyalty cards because I regard them as an even bigger invasion of privacy than CCTV cameras. A supermnarket can tell a lot about you from your purchasing habits.

I also pay for things with cash, partly because credit card companies are good at nailing people with hidden charges and partly because I don't want the entire banking industry knowing my purchasing habits and sending the data to advertisers.

Not just credit cards... I've recently discovered that my bank is charging me £1.00 for each foreign currency transaction. Given the fact that I currently subscribe to two MMO games (one in US $ and the other in Icelandic Krona (Eve Online)) and the fact that I also occasionaly pay for cheap downloadable games which are usualy in US $, I'm not a happy camper.

Needless to say my bank will soon discover the error of it's ways..