I just noticed this at the bottom of a page I'd posted on:

Sponsored by:

Kentucky - Bulletin Board
Find Bulletin board in Kentucky's Online Local Search
www.local.com

A member here received an unsolicited message--PM, I'm pretty sure--that, although apparently innocuous, was unwelcome. It was an invitation to participate in something at the member's listed location.

My first guess was that it came from a lurker who happened to be at the same location. But now, having just seen the above, I am wondering:

is it possible for someone to set up some kind of program to scan the internet for mentions of certain locations, then let the programmer know? Should all of us who have our locations posted along with our names take them off?

it doesn't know it's you, but it did find your location, so it gave a link with the state.

I have noticed Vermont mentioned in the google ads. I think that your lurker guess is the right one.

I imagine that it'd be fairly easy for a programmer to write such a script. In fact, I think it would work much like GoogleAds - based on the content/links of the page, GoogleAds chooses supposedly "related" ads; that is, ads that have paid to be related to certain keywords. Similarly, this "local.com" site could have a program setup to scan through bulletin boards and send messages through a dummy account based on the user's data. As a general rule, though, it may be unwise to post both one's full/real name and one's specific location. Country is probably safe.

You know those ubiquitous ads offering to help you track down your high school friends, with a list of the states in the US? Increasingly I've been seeing them offering to track down people who went to Jakarta Raya High School.

I assumed that they can tell from the code of the ISP originating the request to look at a page that it is in such and such a location, but the software is not sophisticated enough to work out which locations are not in the US.