Anyway they can sell us MORE STUFF!

They've been doing this for years, (including Google, Facebook and the others) but now AI is making them smarter and more efficient about it.

is to have an ironclad sense of sales resistance. It's not a bad idea to teach this concept to young people.

Using the option of "incognito window" is offered by Chrome and it does help, but Google still collects cookies anyway.

Once I made the mistake of clicking on some random ad while I was playing solitaire one day. And I quickly closed that window and went on with my game. Wouldn't you know it, that same ad followed me around everywhere for the next 3 weeks until I finally went into Chrome and deleted all my cookies.

That was years ago, and I've never clicked on any ads since then.

Whenever I use Google search, I type in random Democratic names, or sometimes I use German names for stuff. That seems to fool the tracking aps pretty well.

then do so. I figure that most "privacy controls" are just dummy switches that give people a false sense of security. The bottom line is, that always, everywhere, and under any circumstances, someone is always trying to sell underperforming, overpriced crap that you don't need or even want. Never buy anything on the internet that you didn't go looking for first.

I resist them by shutting them out of my personal universe entirely.

My wife and I don't have cable, satellite or broadcast television. We only subscribe to two or three no-advertising streaming services at a time.

I have a flip phone. I use it mostly as a phone. Sometimes I use it for texts or as a basic camera.

DU is my only social media and I pay to make the advertising go away.

Get a good ad blocker and turn it off for no one.

that's how they make their money. I wish their ads would be less intrusive. It obscures content, especially on phones.

I'm of the mindset that I WILL be seeing ads on the internet all the time, which is annoying, but the more relevant they are to me, the less obnoxious they are (though slightly creepier, admittedly). FB already seems to observe what I do elsewhere on the internet to target ads for me so them adding snooping from their own tools I might use (that I don't even pay for, except for having to see ads) seems expected. Frankly surprised they weren't doing this all along since this would be the obvious goal of any AI that any company lets you use for "free"

I am slowly becoming more and more suspicious that our phone microphones are monitored because my partner and I have had a LOT of times over the years where ads have popped up on social media ads on our phones re: things that we only ever talked about in person but never tried searching for anywhere. THAT f***ing freaks me out when it happens.

Should keep the various troll farms really busy.

I wonder what kind of hallucinated ads Facebook users will get? ED?

Last edited Wed Oct 1, 2025, 06:17 PM - Edit history (2)

For instance, I adopted 2 cats in mid-July. Went on-line to order some cat related items and google about some others.

Ever since then every time I go online, I'm getting pop-up adds for cat stuff. This isn't the first time something like this has occurred. On many other occasions after I've researched a product or subject I'm then flooded with related ads. So you don't need AI chatbot to get pop-up adds, been going on for a while.

I was searching for peach trees six months ago, and I'm still getting ads and emails for peach trees now....
courtesy of Google it would seem.