I often get asked, "how come when I Google such-and-such, I get a different set of search results than so-and-so gets?" Or "how do they know to place ads for [my hobby] bicycles in the websites I visit?"

It's not hard to answer. Search engines are partially aware of your physical location by way of what is known as IP Address¹. They also fine tune your search results based on previous searches you've done, websites you've visited in the past, what you talk about in your email (if you have a gmail account and you're using Google Search) and who you are logged in as of course, which is how they know who you are to begin with.

Is there such a thing as the 'conspiracy gene'? It seems like each of us is predisposed to either believing in conspiracies or not believing in conspiracies. If you believe JFK was shot by a man behind the grassy knoll, then you'll believe that Area 51 is where the government is hiding aliens and the Apollo Moon landing was a fake.
I tend to scoff at people who say that the government or other big organizations are watching or listening. If they are, then the poor schmuck who has the job of watching my particular life run its course must be dying of complete boredom.

But something happened today that gave me the feeling that my every keystroke is being logged.

The embedded ad in the Independent newspaper included products that I had looked at on a different website earlier in the day.

This morning, I visited AllPosters.com. I looked at three posters, didn't buy any of them, and left the website: The posters were of (1) a dog on a bed, (2) third world children in trouble and (3) an Australian Shepherd.

This afternoon, I decided to take a break and visit the UK's Independent newspaper online, just to catch up with the news on the volcano in Iceland. (Conspiracy theorists will tell you the same people who caused the 2008 financial meltdown in Iceland also caused the volcano to erupt). Lo and behold, but didn't I see a highly customized ad for those same three posters in the top banner of the newspaper!

How did it know which posters I looked at on the AllPosters.com website six hours earlier? Was it stored in my cookies or other place on my (Linux/Ubuntu) laptop? Or did it track, via Google website search, what I searched for within the AllPosters.com website, and serve those three exact products up to me later in the form of advertisements?

It's easy to understand how the content of your emails in Google Mail can be used to fine tune what ads you will see as you browse websites containing Google Ads. You can join the dots easily. But for my behavior in one website (AllPoster.com) to be tracked in enough detail to be able to present specific product ads in a completely unrelated website makes me worry a little.

After a bit of amateur detective work, I learn that Google didn't even have anything to do with this particular incident. At least today it didn't. It turns out that the advertising company Adtech.de (a German company, or at least, an entity using a German domain name) had access to enough detailed information of my visit to a US company (AllPosters.com), to serve up ads on a UK website (independent.co.uk). Not that the suffix of a domain name makes any difference. For transnational corporations, borders matter little.

If I were to guess what happened, it is this: Any business can pipe visitor statistics from its website to other interested parties. Details include the visitor's IP Address and specific pages the visitor looked at. That interested party might be an ad agency with connections to a huge network of websites whose owners have signed up as ad "affiliates". Placing a highly targeted ad on their website may vastly increase their chance of getting what is called "click-through" which is how you get paid for driving visitors to click others' ads on your website. Imagine! Instead of having a one-out-of-ten-thousand chance of someone clicking one of your ads, you might have a one-out-of-a-hundred chance of getting that click-through.

Millions of people read the Independent online every day. I'm guessing it is ten million. If one million folks click such a targeted ad in the Independent every day, and the average PPC (Pay Per Click) is 25 cents, there might be $250,000/day in ad revenue. That's close to $100m a year. I know, there are a lot of assumptions in there, but there's gotta be a boat-load of money in highly targeted online advertisements.

I feel tired just thinking about how organizations are following our every keystroke. Life is getting more and more like it is portrayed in the movie Minority Report. In the movie, three savants provide dream images of the future. The police then use that evidence to round up would-be criminals before they commit the crime. It's a modern twist on George Orwell's 1984.

Oh, excuse me, I have to run. There's a knock at the door. I think it's the Thought Police coming to arrest me for a thought I just know I'm going to have tomorrow.