I don't put much effort into it. I might try and leave less of an online trail if I were younger. But a week ago I wondered what a chamfer bit was (champfer? chandler?) and looked it up, intentionally avoiding Wikipedia. I have been getting ads from tool companies ever since.
They don't care you you are. They just want your money.
5 comments:
When I look up a book on somebody's wish list Amazon assumes that I won't be able to live without it, or its near kin.
I use firefox, with ghostery and adblocker and noscript. One side effect is that I can't post pictures to my blog unless I fire up IE or Opera(*) to do it, and another is that some sites (e.g. Forbes) won't load, but the rest load faster and I leave a little less of a footprint.
On the other hand, I suspect that my googling habits will lead their algorithms to conclude that several different people are using my account. And purchasing is done using a different email than blogging, which is different from my personal email...
(*) I use Linux and MacOS at work, but I surf and post from home on machines other people use. VMWare and VirtualBox are nice performers if you have enough memory, for which you need enough budget, and somehow higher priority needs always seem to arise.
I suggest you consider an ad-blocker, and to use DuckDuckGo as your search engine. They work pretty well for me.
Or just mess with the data. Search for 4 inch heels, then oil filter for '89 Kenworth. That is the start of a decent online disguise.
I shop a lot online, and therefore get a ton of pop-ups hawking whatever I've been shopping for recently. Doesn't bother me a bit. I encourage the trend, I suppose, by frequently clicking on the offered links and even buying their stuff. For me it's like walking into a shop I frequent and having a knowledgeable salesperson greet me with the news that they just got something in I might be interested in--except that it's even easier online to say, in effect, no, thanks, you were mistaken to believe I'm interested in that.
I enjoy salespeople who know their business.
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