This topic

Is bt doing ip targeted advertising

Tog — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:56:48 GMT

I've noticed that when I search a topic on my PC my wife gets pop-up ads for the same products on her laptop. This is so annoying, she now knows what her anniversary gift is likely to be. I can't see how this can be happening without BT's involvement.

Re: Is bt doing ip targeted advertising

WSH — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:42:03 GMT

More likely to be the website or browser. What would BT gain from it?

Re: Is bt doing ip targeted advertising

gg30340 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:17:27 GMT

It is most likely that it is web browsers and its search engine cookies that are tracking your search results. If you use the same accounts for such things as Google, Microsoft Amazon etc they use tracking cookies which can tell what devices are using the same IP address and home network.

To stop this you should either have your own logon for each account and not share it with others. You can also turn off "personalised adds' on your web browsers and clear the history and cookies frequently.

You should also clear or turn off the history on sites like Amazon, YouTube etc.

See the following link for what Microsoft do.

Microsoft Edge browsing activity for personalized advertising and experiences | Microsoft Support

Re: Is bt doing ip targeted advertising

WSH — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:33:39 GMT

In fact, I haven't done any web design work for 20 years but now I think about it, there is an alternative to cookies called "IP affinity." Instead of storing a cookie on peoples machines, that they can block, you store it on your server and link it to the IP address. You can look it up.

According to Co-Pilot:

"Cookie-based affinity provides per-user session stickiness at the web layer, while IP-based affinity provides client IP stickiness at the network layer, with cookies generally offering better granularity and reliability for web applications."

Re: Is bt doing ip targeted advertising

Tog — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:51:25 GMT

I use Zen and duckduckgo, otherwise I wouldn't have asked about the IP. Sorry, I should have mentioned that in my op

Re: Is bt doing ip targeted advertising

WSH — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:10:51 GMT

I doubt whether either use IP-based affinity to track users, but I bet the third-party adverts do.