Published on 12, July, 2020
I have adblock and when I go on sites I'm still getting ads, often to the point where they obscure what I'm looking for. And I hate cookies, stupid things, why do I have to have them? Why do some sites make you jump through hoops not to have them following you around all the time? Why when I search for something do I get a load of stuff I never asked for and next to none of the stuff I did ask for?
Thanks for listening to this rant.
Computers make neurotypical and stereotypical judgements about your search history, websites you use etc. Mine thinks I am male heterosexual 40 year old based on my searches, so the ads are rarely relevant.
I find it frustrating when I click on an email to read something interesting, and before it can show me the page has asked me to sign up for the news that I already received and clicked on to open the page. Surely a cookie is supposed to prevent the site from asking me to sign up when I am already signed up. And if it's a site I haven't signed up to the newsletter, surely I would want to read first before working out if the site is the one I want to sign up for.
Every time you search on the internet, the search engine uses your web history to calculate or predict what you might be most interested in when you do your search. Otherwise, how can it know how to rank the millions of possible sites to present to you? You can switch this off (I don't remember where) but you might need to compromise and trawl through many pages of results to find what is most relevant.