I’m being stalked! I can feel it. I can see them. I see them at all times of the day or evening. I see them no matter how hard I try to ditch them. It is really nerve-racking.
I got an email from Dillard’s Department Store telling me about the annual fall men’s clothing sale. It has always been a great sale. They try to empty the store of merchandise that hasn’t sold to make room for the new fall items coming in a few weeks. I’ve saved a lot of money over the years at their August sale, so I read the ad on their website. Bad move!
I looked at dress shirts, golf shorts, and tee shirts, shoes of all kinds, even a couple of sweaters, in September, yet. We decided to drive to Stockton and save a lot of money. Bad move! You have to spend a lot of money to save a lot of money.
After reviewing the sale items, I turned to other things on the web; there was an ad for the shoes I had looked at. I went to another website; I saw an ad for the shirt I had looked at. Then there was the ad that had all of the items I had looked at. They stalked me for well over a week.
This week I booked a flight to St. Louis for October. Now the airlines are stalking me, the hotels are stalking me, and the car rental companies are stalking me. It is only a matter of time before Uber starts serious stalking shenanigans.
Our world, once we sign on to the internet, is no longer ours. Why is that? Google makes most of its money from ads. Most blogs make money from ads. Not this one! Without ads, there is no viable internet for the masses. I think we all get that. Money is the easy answer.
Retail businesses are riding the crest of a major sea change in how they do business. Newspapers, those that still exist, tell us about brick-and-mortar stores closing, malls shuttering or standing half-built. Advertising dollars are moving by the buckets full to the internet because that is where people shop. Buy something today and receive it the next day on your front porch.
Websites will even curate sets of clothes for you each month. Try them on, send them back, or pay for what you keep. However, be prepared for the onslaught of continuing ads that will stalk you for days.
We must assume that if we go online there is little or no privacy. That’s also true when we are offline. [i] Google Maps stores your location online. Go to a store, it saves that location for future use. Google calls it improving the customer experience. I call it an invasion of privacy, but I still use it all the time.
Nearly two billion devices operate on Google’s Android software each day. Consider how much they know about so many people, and how vulnerable that information is to the world’s hackers. Those who can write the algorithms control much of the world’s information, private and public. Is that what we want?
I wanted to use Google Maps to find a local cannabis store, for medicinal purposes only. Do I want every pot dealer in the county stalking me for months? Not yet!
