Colossal PITA

Several decades ago there was a film called Colossus: The Forbin Project. The premise was basically that computers got tired of speaking with humans and dealing with our crap, so they colluded and took over the world.

We’re headed in that direction, as can be witnessed by this ad in my Facebook feed:

So much wrong with this, including Amazon adding me to a list that was somehow transferred to Facebook (I don’t even use the same email address for the two of them), but if I wanted to fend any of this off, I’d have to use different browsers, because the reason I find ads on other websites for products I’ve bought on Amazon is that the browser picks it up and passes it on everywhere I go.

I’ve only got three browsers in use (and one of them, a Microsoft product only gets opened if a site unaccountably won’t work with Chrome or Firefox. So either I clear my web history constantly (which means I have to log back into everything from Amazon to WaPo), or I put up with this kind of peering over my shoulder.

(And even using Firefox in private browser mode doesn’t stop it.)

Second thing is this geolocation crap. If I could figure out a way to turn that off, I’d do it. I’m perfectly happy specifying what area I’m searching in, and in fact I loathe the helpful “looking for a [whatever] in Washington, D.C.?” intrusions. But if it can be done, I don’t know how.

But then there’s the “Manage Your Ad Preferences” link. You can’t manage your ad preferences in Facebook. Here’s their “Manage Ad Preferences” page:

Shifting anything from “yes, bring it” to “no” simply means that you’ll still be buried in ads, but “they won’t be relevant to you”. I do not call this “managing”.

But, finally, that “Tell us what you think” wheeze is as useful as a chocolate teapot. Your choices for “feedback” are binary. I want a text-entry form where I could really tell them what I think.