This is off-topic, but I was a little startled when I went to Diana's cousin page and saw an ad for the local plumber who just did an estimate for my new bathroom. Google must really be selling its search input data heavily! (That's not a reflection on Diana, just on the online world.) Karla On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 2:33 PM, Diana Gale Matthiesen <DianaGM@dgmweb.net>wrote: > Shamelessly touting my own "cousins" page: > http://dgmweb.net/Resources/Misc/CousinsChart.html > > Diana > >

> From: Karla Huebner > Sent: Sunday, October 06, 2013 2:57 PM > To: autosomal-dna@rootsweb.com > Subject: Re: [AUTOSOMAL-DNA] once removed etc. > > This is off-topic, but I was a little startled when I went to Diana's > cousin page and saw an ad for the local plumber who just did an estimate > for my new bathroom. Google must really be selling its search input data > heavily! (That's not a reflection on Diana, just on the online world.) Yes, Google does keep track of your interests. About two years ago, I remember doing extensive searching to find a new bedroom set. I soon found bedroom furniture ads popping up on sites everywhere I visited. Then I spent some time searching on table lamps (for my new night stands). Lamp ads started popping up. The phenomenon has not only continued, it has increased, and it often includes ads for local businesses, not some distant web retailer, as you discovered. Searches at eBay seem to have the same effect, not just at eBay, but on other sites as well. At first, this "intrusiveness" alarmed and angered me. Then I found that a lot of the ads really interested me. They were right on target to my interests though I sometimes wanted to be able to tell someone I'd *found* the bedroom set I wanted. No more bedroom furniture ads, please!! I now have a totally different perspective on "targeted advertising." I no longer view it with hostility, and I no longer feel guilty that visitors to my sites see an advertising banner. My sites need to pay for themselves, and this seems, to me, to be an innocuous way to do it. By the way, if you want to reduce the amount of "tracking" that's done on you, *don't* stay logged in to sites all day just for the convenience of not having to log in again, especially not the social network sites and search engine sites. Log out when you're done, and if you don't like the nuisance of repeatedly logging in, get a password manager that will do it for you. I don't know how much real difference it makes, but it makes sense that being logged in to Google would make it easier for them to track you. Diana