I really detest the image of me that Facebook is creating. First, I was offered some idiotic Russian paraphernalia to express my love of Putin, and now I’m given this thing:
What in my life journey could have given one the idea that I’m aware of this Prince fellow or that I wear T-shirts, let alone vulgar T-shirts with writing on them. Jeez. And that’s a place I’m supposed to get my news from?
I’m having a massive attack of snobbishness.
Who knows. Someone paid money to target women of a certain age in a certain area with this ad. Facebook ad targeting isn’t very fine tuned. At any rate, I have my browser set up to block Facebook ads so I don’t see them.
When I had my Facebook gender set to “woman”, I kept getting ads for bridal boot camps. When I had my Facebook gender set to “man” I kept getting ads for mortgages. I had it set up for no gender and then I changed it back when I started using a dating app because it kept sending me women as matches.
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I know, it’s my age. Which is even more annoying. At least, I finally got an ad for Hillary, which made me feel better.
“When I had my Facebook gender set to “woman”, I kept getting ads for bridal boot camps. When I had my Facebook gender set to “man” I kept getting ads for mortgages. I had it set up for no gender and then I changed it back when I started using a dating app because it kept sending me women as matches.”
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In the early days of the blogosphere, it was always amusing to visit a feminist site that had a post condemning pornography and see that the ads were almost all for porn sites. Almost as good were the posts about stopping human trafficking that had ads for mail order brides.
That particular glitch seems to have been fixed years ago. I should have saved some screen shots.
Back when my blog was on Blogger, I was horrified to see how many mail order bride ads appeared after I published a couple of posts on the subject. 🙂
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On the other hand, the personalized ads that appear on YOUR website are sometimes quite interesting.
Whenever I buy something anywhere on the Internet (or even do some serious searching for items that I ultimately don’t buy), then for the next day or two, the ads that WordPress sends to my computer via your blog are all for variations on the item I bought or searched out. Big Brother is obviously watching my shopping habits.
On the third day or so, your ads go back to being generic.
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In theory, they are using statistical analysis to try to identify things you are most likely to be interested in buying. Unfortunately, correlations don’t prove relationships.
I’ve had the same issue. I took a trip to Vegas to visit a grandchild who lives there. Since then, I’ve been getting peppered with offers of gambling excursions from the airline (Southwest), even though I never set foot in a casino on the one trip I took and have no interest in doing so. “Ah, you took a trip to Vegas so you must be a gambler so you must be interested in going back to Vegas to gamble.” Spelled out, that logic sounds just as stupid as it is.
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A few years ago I bought a swim suit online from Macy’s. For the rest of the summer, whenever I visited blogs, ads for that exact same bathing suit popped up. What was the point of that? They already had my money!
Even more so, it only came in one color — it wasn’t as though I could have bought a second one in a different color. Why didn’t they at least show me a different bathing suit?
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Maybe they thought you were collecting them. 🙂
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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