[it is the age of so-called A.I. and everyone has been buying and selling my personal data online for like 10 years]
targeted advertising: we see that you bought a wallet last week.
me: yes
targeted advertising: would you like to um... purchase additional wallets?
me: no?
targeted advertising: damn. almost had her this time
That one article where a guy lost a cat, bought a pet urn off Amazon, and was only getting reccomended pet urns and coffins for months afterwards.
this reminded me of something tangentially related, which is so dark but also very funny i promise: i may or may not be single-handedly responsible for one of Chrome's early bookmark-auto-sorting features being removed because i had some bookmarks in my writing reference folder about the effects of various types of bodily trauma, such as stabbing and shooting, AND in another folder i had some bookmarks related to depression/anxiety symptom management kind of stuff, and it auto-grouped all that shit into a folder labeled, i shit you not, "Suicide"
i sent Google feedback and was gently like. hey so listen. maybe, not this. there are people who would have had a much worse reaction to this than "huh? what?". iirc i got a response from an actual dev in a tone i would describe as "professionally distressed" and then the feature got nuked shortly thereafter. can't actually confirm it was because of me (the feature also just seemed to uh, not work) but it was very fucking funny
