So today at around 10am this morning, I was looking at some illustrations on istockphoto.com.
The images were of stylized torsos for a clinical massage customer. I did not find anything suitable, so no purchase was made.
Now it's 9:30 pm and I'm reading a Huff Post article from my AOL home page. Off to the right were typical ads except.... wait... just a damn minute....an Ad from istockphoto! It's in the most prominate spot and guess which photo's are in the scroll?
Yep, The EXACT SAME ONES I was looking at 12 hours ago.
Ain't that somethin'.ooooweeeeeeoooooo, spooky. Somewhere, someplace, there's a data base tracking everything we do. You'll never convince me otherwise.
Happy Web surfing.
Posted by Alicia B. Jennings (Member # 1272) on :
Big Brother be a watching. You google something and Google brings up past serches. You get emails from companies that may have what you are looking for, on sale. Believe me, one day all that you do online, cell phone, text etc will be stored in some giant data base. Your home is photographed and re-photographed ever few years in case you make any changes without a permit. "We will find you, you cannot get away" I think I hear a knock at the doo,,,,,
Posted by Russ McMullin (Member # 5617) on :
I don't disagree. I see it happening too.
Posted by Kissymatina (Member # 2028) on :
A little different but this one kinda creeped me out.... just yesterday on facebook, I got a "someone you might know" recommendation. Jeff's ex-wife. I couldn't hit the X button fast enough.
Posted by Dusty Campbell (Member # 4601) on :
But they're a step behind. By the time I'm seeing the ads, I've already made my purchase.
It is really creepy though. I ditched facebook because I signed up with a fairly fresh throw away email and even though I didn't let it search my email, it came up with several people I knew.
My niece's phone was stolen recently and they tracked it with the gps in it. Even without a gps, a record is kept of what towers you're using, so it's a general map of where you're going. With a little knowledge of your life, you can be tracked. A gps you voluntarily carry every day establishing your patterns is alot easier though.
I wouldn't doubt that the microphone and camera can be activated without your knowledge or permission.
Soon, we'll have drones flying over every county just like they all have SWAT teams.
quote:Jan. 11 - U.S. civil rights groups are raising the alarm about plans by the Houston and Miami police forces to add unmanned aerial drones to their crime-fighting arsenals.
And we're now ok with killing American citizens without the benefit of due process(as long as everyone's convinced they're terrorists).
It's a recipe for keeping terrorists at bay I tell you.[sarcasm] Of course it doesn't seem like rocket science to sneak into the US via Mexico with anything they wanted. By now, they could have tons of nasty things here.
Anyone want to move and start a better country? I don't think the government is going to give ours back to us.
Posted by Frank Smith (Member # 146) on :
Funny, I bought my first iStock pics two nights ago— acanthus leaf etchings. So I just went to Huffington Post and yeeeeup there's the iStock ad! It showed more acanthus leaf etchings— the ones I considered but passed over. They're beautiful and tempting and more delightful than the untargeted crap ads that haunt some of my web wanderings.
"Find 50+ Women In Your Area!" comes up a lot on Pandora and nowhere else. How do they know I'm over 50 but think I'm single?
Posted by Tim Barrow (Member # 576) on :
They are called tracking cookies,...they are employed by almost all of the major websites and the info they gather is worth quite abit to advertisers and marketing firms,.... almost all search sites use the data gathered from your searches to sell to advertisers so they can target a captive audience,....surely all you folks don't think google and yahoo or bing are providing all the massive infrastructure and the server farms needed to do the job you ask of them across the planet out of the kindness in their hearts,....
edited to add it is really amazing to walk into one of these server farms,...imagine a huge warehouse with nothing but computers in it,....with special wirng hanging from the cieling with a room off to one side the size of a two car garage just to house the battery banks for the uninteruptable power supply that would kick in during the time it takes to start the back up generators (in an adjacent bay the same size)to keep the many servers running if the power does go out,...all temperature controlled and fireproofed to keep the hard drive units and mainframe servers the size of your washing machine cool and working well
[ January 12, 2012, 12:59 AM: Message edited by: Tim Barrow ]
Posted by Dennis Kiernan (Member # 12202) on :
Facebook was advertising all this geriatric stuff to me, so I changed my birthdate in my Profile to 1993. Instantly all the ads changed to stuff for kids.
Posted by Checkers (Member # 63) on :
Here's are things you might want to entertain...
Use a Mozilla browser like FireFox or SeaMonkey. I use SeaMonkey because it gives me greater control over cookie management and I can block or unblock just about any site cookies.
In addition, most Mozilla browsers have a variety of add-ons that can be configured to block both cookies, animations/Flash and advertisements. I'm currently using adblock plus and it makes surfing the web a more enjoyable experience.
Some privacy websites offer per-configured "host" files that you can install on your system and they will block many unwanted or unscrupulous web sites. The only drawback to using host files is you still may need access to some sites for any number of reasons.
Finally, and most importantly, Keep your antivirus software up to date, make back ups on a regular basis and scan your computer on a regular basis for malware or adware to make sure there aren't any programs that might be tracking you. Malwarebytes' and Spybot are 2 good programs.
Havin' fun,
Checkers
Posted by Kelly Thorson (Member # 2958) on :
quote:Originally posted by Dennis Kiernan: Facebook was advertising all this geriatric stuff to me, so I changed my birthdate in my Profile to 1993. Instantly all the ads changed to stuff for kids.
George Orwell was correct....just a few years off the mark.
They are watching us!!!......and we can't hide.
Posted by Frank Smith (Member # 146) on :
But they're making offers no one wants to refuse... Posted by Dusty Campbell (Member # 4601) on :
But it's on stuff I already bought. -And got a better deal on.
Posted by Curtis hammond (Member # 2170) on :
Any one use those "rewards" cards? They track every thing you buy when using those cards. They build a profile of your life. They can tell when who is PG, or who is not, or who is ill or not, or who is eating well or not, after a while they can talk about your family, age of kids etc..
Posted by Kathy Weeks (Member # 10828) on :
I just use my husband's name for signing up for things - then I'm invisible. Poor guy, I shouldn't do that - he's paranoid enough already! Posted by Mike O'Neill (Member # 470) on :
I use an extension for chrome called 'Ghostery' that works well to keep the trackers at bay, I've noticed that without trackers a lot of the advertisments don't work at all...
It's free and they have extensions for just about all the browsers.
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