I tried to train Facebook. First thought: I absolutely do not want it to advertise to me anything I might actually want to buy (like books): that feels creepy.

I tried to train Facebook. First thought: I absolutely do not want it to advertise to me anything I might actually want to buy (like books): that feels creepy. So maybe I could deliberately interact with ads for things I'll never buy, like fashion? (I dress myself out of charity shops, mostly.) Second thought: If I interact with ads with hot guys in them, Facebook will show me more hot guys, which is nice eye candy. It seemed to work, for a while. Some of the ads were for underwear, definitely targetted at gay men, and bordering on being NSFW (which is fine, as I don't Facebook at W). And then I mostly abandoned Facebook. --- For YouTube, before I got a free deal on YouTube Premium with my phone plan, things were weirder. YouTube's video recommendation algorithm knew me well, but its ad recommendations were very confused, including about which language I spoke. It weirdly often gave me ads for scientific lab equipment, sometimes in Hebrew. (I'm a web developer, am Irish, and live in Ireland, and don't speak any Hebrew. I have an interest in linguistics, and have read up on the origin of the Semitic trisyllabic root, but that doesn't mean I speak Hebrew.)