How are Ad Companies Targeting You?
Do you ever get the feeling that the internet mega-companies are stalking you? Well, that’s because they are.
Companies like, Facebook and Google, are collecting data on your shopping habits, hobbies and then targeting ads directly to your taste.
Jeremy Gillula is a Senior Staff Technologist who says the profile not only contains your hobbies but other things like your age, gender, race and some have even managed to get your political views to better target ads to you.
But there has to be a way to check exactly what they have collected to create your profile. Google allows you to look at how they’ve profiled you by logging on to your Google account.
Why do they track what you watch online, what device you are using and where you live? “The more relevant the ad, the more likely you are to click on it and then that turns into the revenue for the big tech companies,” Gillula explained.
In Facebook’s settings you can click on ads and it shows what influences the ads that you’ll see. But Facebook and Amazon do let you opt out of tailored ads. Google, lets you choose to use their site anonymously and they say they don’t profile you if you opt into what they call ‘incognito’ mode.
For most other sites you can’t stop them from collecting data and there’s no way to see what the internet as a whole knows about you except to look at the ads you are served.
