A Cartoon Butt Clenching a Bar of Soap ⇥ arstechnica.com

Nate Anderson, Ars Technica:

The great irony of online advertising these days is that it’s often claimed to be “targeted,” mining our personal and demographic information to serve us the ads that we allegedly want to see. Wouldn’t I prefer to view ads “relevant to my interests”? Maybe. But I can say with confidence that after two decades of being “extremely online” for work, the number of ads I have voluntarily and enthusiastically clicked upon must number in the low double digits.

Instead, the engines powering these ad networks continue to bombard me with two kinds of ads: 1) those that are wholly irrelevant to my interests and 2) those that are relevant to my interests because they display the exact product I once looked at in some online store. Ad targeting companies may “know a lot about me,” but they don’t know me in any truly useful way.

Ad tech companies will never have enough information about us to ensure truly reliable targeting, but they have more than enough to be a privacy nightmare unlike anything the world has seen before.

Update: This felt familiar to me. Four years ago, a similar butt-themed ad — this time for pyjamas with a flap — followed Vice writer Kate Dries around the web.