Diana, Thanks for the thoughts on targeted advertising. It's true I tend to keep sites I use a lot open. Still, up to now most of the clearly targeted advertising I see is right on Gmail (or on Facebook where it's clearly targeted only to my age and gender and not to anything very specific about me--I don't give Facebook much to work with as far as shopping interests). I'm less hostile than bemused by the targeted marketing I see. I can't escape it since I'm online a lot, but I'm not really the ideal target for most of what's being sold. Of the four ads I see right now, two are genealogical (big surprise), one is for skin tighteners (? unlikely ever to interest me) and one for a chauffeur tour of Italy (if I ever get to Italy again I doubt I will want a chauffeur)! Karla On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 6:18 PM, Diana Gale Matthiesen <DianaGM@dgmweb.net>wrote: > > 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 > > > > ______________________________ > For answers to Frequently Asked Questions about mailing lists, please see: > http://dgmweb.net/MailingListFAQs.html > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > AUTOSOMAL-DNA-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without > the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >