Recently, I got into a pleasant argument with someone about whether Joan Jett, in her early days, was a punk rocker (the argument was pleasant BECAUSE I WON). What this required was the two of us looking at a bunch of YouTube videos from the early 80s (the videos were from the 80s; the inventors of YouTube were in diapers then….). We didn’t have to watch that many, but, of course, there was a lot of starting a video and then realizing it wasn’t what we were looking for, so we might have opened fifteen or twenty videos.
A day later this from Amazon.com shows up in one of my email accounts:
(For those who don’t know, Joan Jett’s first band was The Runaways).
I’m pretty certain I wasn’t logged in to either my YouTube account or my Google accounts, though I was using an ISP that I routinely access those from.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not coming after you.
And, as the kids used to say, because I can:
Clear all your cookies and it will go away.
Pingback: The Consumer Surveillance State: The Joan Jett Edition | microBEnet: The microbiology of the Built Environment network.
Say thanks to DoubleClick (that is, Google) and other activity tracking companies. ISPs want nothing to do with that kind of tracking; while they might enjoy the cash they don’t want the legal hassle. If you find it creepy, block scripts and cookies and don’t use Chrome or IE.
This is a fight that will never end, between the smug little bastards who insist that court supervised government tracking is the WORST THING EVER because it might someday land a few people on a watch list and those who are annoyed at intrusive unregulated corporate tracking EVERY SINGLE DAY. In a decent world there would be space for people to be concerned about all of these issues, but our lefty gatekeepers have decreed that the Righteous must pick the one but not the other.