Essentially, an increasing number of pages (and more specifically advertising) seems to be able to detect where my physical location is. Is there any way to block this? Ideally, I'd like to be able to deny pages the ability to detect my location at all, but replacing it with some arbitrary city would be satisfactory too.

I'm running Firefox 3.0.8

Thanks for any help resolving this.

I'm guessing that it is related to your IP address, or some address along the route.

Several sites will display fake personals ads consisting of generic images and usernames, with their location being some town in my area. Most of them are either my ISP's town or their mother company's town.

bloggy right... its a geo-coding thing based on your ip address.

you can't "block" it... cuz you're going to have to come from SOME ip address.
most you can do is use a proxy server to make it seem like you're coming from somewhere else.

You can get an account with Dreamhost, and setup a shell account, the run an SSH tunnel to circumvent the IP. I'm still trying to figure out how to do it so I can access such places as Hulu from Canada. :P Its not that hard, just lazy.

If you are sick of ads, just use Adblock Plus Firefox Extension.

Proxies kinda suck.
But for proxies, may I suggest using TOR. It's like a P2P Proxy method. We all give up a little bit of bandwidth, to use the proxies provided by other people on the network. Pretty cool shit.

Thanks for the advice. If it's simply them pulling generic location data from my IP address then I'm not too worried about it. I was more concerned that somehow they were pulling stuff through firefox.

The fact that there are ads doesn't really bother me. (The text/google ones, anyway) It's the omni present dating services telling me that they have so and so many people who would like to meet me and then nail the city I'm in. I hadn't thought that they'd be using the IP to get that info, though.

(and as for the adds that do bother me... There's flashblock and javascript options. No more advanced scripting for them.)

I'll keep those two proxies in mind though if things get bad. Actually, might try them out just to test the theory. If I go through one of them and these sites still are getting data from me and not just IP...

Thanks again.

Remember also that using anonymous proxies puts your information through an untold number of possibly malicious servers - possible snooping ensues.

Yeah using others proxies is kinda scary.
But there is options out there to setup your own secure proxie using a host, and some scripts.

very true. I am using a trusted friend's proxy at the moment for bypassing IP restrictions and circumventing Websense type blocks at my girlfriend's work. I could set up my own to do the same job which would mean I could trust my proxy. Only problem is that you are back to the IP geo-tracking issue again....

I wouldn't worry about targeted ads in general terms. However, you'll notice that facebook has VERY WELL targeted ads (same with gmail) and that's because their software scans your content to deliver targeted ads. All the info in your gmail account plus all your info on facebook are available to advertisers in this way. In fact, my girlfriend who has nothing filled out in the "information" fields of her facebook profile gets ads for a tiny College a few blocks away, despite the fact that our IP usually traces us to edmonton or vancouver which are roughly 1000km+ away. It does this because it is obviously scanning her private messages and wall posts etc and extracting the specific name of the tiny community we live in...

Well for things like Gmail, and Facebook, etc. That is part of the TOS, and if you disagree with it, you always have the option to not to use their service.

As for Gmail, I believe you can encrypt your email to get around that.

I've decided to go back to plain old POP3 for email. The whole 'cloud/social' thing gives me the creeps.