I've always found it rather interesting the way that various advertising mechanisms, such as google ads, categorizes me. These things end up showing ads that some massively complicated algorithm has indicated that I am most likely to be interested in. It got me thinking a bit: what sort of person does the internet think you are?

So, just for fun, I was thinking back among the ads I've seen over the last few months, and assembling a personality for "me", from the perspective of advertising algorithms, and thinking about what sort of life that individual would live, and was amused by how radically different from my own life this alternative me is.

Internet-me is a well-educated, single woman. I'm an athiest, a morning person, a runner, an active democrat who is socially liberal but financially conservative, and a fan of wrestling and korean basketball. I've been in the first stages of learning java-script for the last 8 years. I'm well off, but up to my eyeballs in student loan debt. I'm currently looking to purchase a used audi, for which I'll likely purchase geico insurance. I like gangster rap and 1970's big-band swing. I like camping and other out-door activities. I speak english, russian, korean, and spanish.

Who are "you", according to the internet? No need to draw attention to how you and internet-you are different though.

I block most ads, but according to the various e-mails I tend to get...

I'm apparently massively overweight, balding, with genitalia that's far too small, in dire need of loans and diplomas, and wanting to meet eligible women from Eastern Europe.

The ads I do see have been mainly focused on various kinds of paint.

There are ads on the internet now?

Facebook always gives me adverts for lingerie, its not my fault though :( I see *nice* pictures and I click, I don't mean to, its just an automatic response. God knows what facebook thinks they know about me :/

I have many faces. My standard life is too off of what I search. I do not know who I am myself. Google algorithms would think I am a president of Mars dressing in girl clothes.

The internet thinks I'm obsessed with knowing the arrest records of random people in the same city as me, so I can use the information socially to 'checkmate' them in conversation. I haven't ever looked up any arrest records for anyone, so I'm assuming it's a more generic ad with a <insert city name here!> text that then gets customized based on my location.

"Find out the arrest records of people you know in Kansas City!"

Reminds me of the Simpsons joke where the rock band singer was onstage and said, "But seriously, nobody rocks like..." *looks at the town name he taped to the back of his guitar* "SPRINGFIELD!" *crowd cheers loudly*

The internet thinks I might be looking for a game education and oh, I might want to give Dropbox a try. Oh, and smoke e-cigarettes and buy Ray-Bans.

At home, I tend to make all searches and open almost all links in incognito mode, mostly using the regular mode for services like webmail and gamedev.net which are convenient to maintain a login for. In general I seem to get fairly generic ads, which I guess is kind of the idea behind my slightly weird habit. I also have plugins set to load on click, mostly to avoid noisy or distracting animated ads, but possibly helps avoid certain types of tracking too.

At work, I have a few test accounts with various social networks. I rarely log into them, they have no "friends" and tend just to post hyperlinks with phrases like "test" in them. The ads are predictably generic, they have nearly zero data to work with. Lots of "young mother's secret to losing weight" right beside some kind of manly muscle magic, if memory serves.

However, my favourite aspect were the periodic emails from Twitter that would suggest following certain users. It started out as one might expect, highly ranked celebrities like Stephen Fry, etc. Over time, it started to get a bit desperate, no longer names I recognised - though I'm not one to pay too much attention to the rich and famous.

Finally, it got downright bizarre! I still have a screenshot of an email* asking me to follow what appears to be three "nobody" accounts, one of which was a "cam girl", another seems mainly an enthusiastic follower of such accounts, the other hardly used... I pictured a lonely, anthropomorphised suggestion algorithm, struggling with no inputs of any kind - slowly descending into madness: "you must like something!". Not sure if I simply unsubscribed soon after that or whether it just gave up on me at that point, but I don't recall getting many emails recently.

* The email really seemed to be legitimately from Twitter, all the links appeared to be going to the main twitter site (though I didn't click on them, I just manually constructed the Twitter profile URL from the information in the email).

I apparently want to take a vacation in Europe, get an education in mortuary science ( seriously had adds for this ), and have a professional come to my house to fix my computer.

Ebay thinks I want to buy broken game systems, jewelry, "smart watches", and industrial chemicals.

Every time I log in to Gamedev and then browse other sites I get lots of Amazon Afiliate Ads advertising a book called "Servent of the Lord".