Friday, January 27, 2012

Big Internet is watching you

This google ad preferences meme has been traveling the internets for a couple of days. If you haven't seen it, they target the popup ads you ignore according to some kind of algorithum that's gauged by the cookies they sleathily embed in your computer. People have been checking and sharing their results and they're hilariously inaccurate.

Google thinks I'm a 55-64 year old male who is interested in combat sports. Not even sure what that means but the only traditional sport I follow at all is baseball. And I'll also follow any link that has to do with aeronautics, including ballooning and skydiving but pretty sure those aren't considered combat. But to be fair, I've often been mistaken for a guy on the internets.

Apparently, google isn't the only one who tracks you this way. Lots of other websites collect your click info. I checked them all and only one was even close to capturing my true essence.

The good news is you can theoretically opt-out from these cookies on all the sites except google. Me, I don't bother opting out of anything. I've found over the years, the more you opt-out the more spam ends up in your in-box. If you ignore them, sometimes they go away on their own. Kind of the same way I deal with trolls.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

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2 Comments:

Blogger merlallen said...

The only thing I use google for is crostic and crosswords clues. From all of that they think I'm a 55-64 year old male who is interested in Arts and Entertainment. I am a 53 year old male so they were close.

3:32:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

They do have about a 10% success rate... :)

4:53:00 PM  

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