> Every time you change devices or delete cookies, the ad targeting starts from a blank slate. This hasn’t been true for quite some time. These banks on you ar

> Every time you change devices or delete cookies, the ad targeting starts from a blank slate. This hasn’t been true for quite some time. These banks on you are really elaborate. They know where you live, they know where you work, they know where you drink your coffee and they know your online behavior. Those factors mean that you’re never truely anonymous anymore. When you buy a new device it gets tiered to your access points, then your online behavior gets profiled and matched to people who frequent your access points. Last summer I was on a business trip to another region of my country. Just before I went I had to turn in my work pc for repairs, which meant I had to use the borrow device from our IT department. Despite never having used this device before, and never having logged in from that particular hotel I still ended up getting adds for a very specific online course that I had taken earlier that month as well as a pair of shoes I had just bought. I guess the irony in that is that even though they we’re able to pinpoint who I was, through what seem like impossible means, they still didn’t know I had actually already bought those products they were advertising.