Targeted advertising is actually quite good at separating you the person from you your marketing footprint. Unfortunately, the ways it does this are hard to exp

Targeted advertising is actually quite good at separating you the person from you your marketing footprint. Unfortunately, the ways it does this are hard to explain, but let me give an example. A friend of mine was convinced that Google was data-mining his Gmail because it recommended a flight on a related search atop the dates he was considering visiting a friend (if I recall correctly, he looked up driving directions and Google suggested "You could get there faster if you took <FLIGHT> on <EXACT DATE HE AND HIS FRIEND HAD BEEN TALKING ABOUT FLYING>"). I punched in the same directions as him in an incognito browser session and... Got the same flight suggestion. Then I looked at the nearby flights and found that the suggested one was really just the cheapest one that week. Turns out his friend and he were planning to meet on a day they happened to be free... Because it was near a holiday, so a lot of people were free, so airlines factored that into their pricing model, so Google recommended a flight because it was a popular flight that a lot of people wanted to take between those two destination points. It's far, far more likely that targeted advertising is working because we are not the special snowflakes we believe ourselves to be. The correlation algorithms can guess a lot from a few data points when they have billions of correlations to sort through.