You guys, I found the prettiest desk chair on Facebook Marketplace. It was a 3-minute Uber ride away. We picked it up last night. It's perfect, I love it so much.🥰

The only problem with having been hunting for a new chair online is the dreaded avalanche of ads for chairs I'm getting and will get until the end of time. I'm telling you, retargeting has to be the dumbest martech (marketing technology) they ever came up with, and I am over it.

In 2014 and for nearly three years I worked for a martech start-up. We were literally collecting and writing profiles of every tech tool to gather in a massive database for marketers. I did content generation, wrote the blog & newsletter, was content team leader, website power user (UX), and did R&D. You wear a lot lot of hats in a start-up. Anyway, for those years I was immersed in all the tech tools marketers use to convert us all to paying customers, essentially. There were over 5000 tools. And this was BEFORE AI.

Retargeting? That's when ads follow you around the web showing you the thing you just looked at, whether you Googled for it or visited a store's website or mentioned it in a social media post. Supposedly retargeting, part of the wider marketing scheme of "personalization," aids in conversion rate. Conversion is the last part of the sales funnel when you actually click and purchase whatever thing. Sure, retargeting (and personalization as a whole) might help sales. They all show proof of this, percentages of users who converted. They know where you're going online, they know what you're shopping for, they know when you're stalling on the thing in your shopping cart. They hate that. They start emailing you, man.

But the damn tech isn't smart enough to know when you already converted! I BOUGHT a chair yesterday. Stop hounding me with every freakin' chair in the world for the love of God.

This is what people mean when they lament that the internet has changed for the worse compared to the old days. In the beginning, you were free to just...browse the web. Jump ahead a few decades, and here come all the tools that go along with personalized marketing. They track our every click, like, upvote, etc. They think they're creating such accurate profiles of us, and they think they know what to do with all that data. They tell us it's all for our benefit, they tell us it tailors content, messages, and ads to our individual preferences, behaviors, and characteristics.

Bullshit. It's not helpful. It's not appreciated. They don't know us. It's annoying af and I wish there was a way to opt-out of any kind of "personalized" internet malarkey.

Here's a prime example to illustrate the benefit of a web personalization opt-out tool. I used to do a lot of freelance writing and editing (and I hope to return to it). Writing and editing for multitudes of clients means a lot of research online, on a wide variety of topics. Man, I can't even think of all the freelance writing and editing jobs I did. I wrote press releases for video companies (everything from cameras to post-production), I wrote about an online source for digital comic books, edited a book on style (fashion), a few mental health clinical worksheets (on Anorexia and Bulimia in teens, on blood injury phobia), content for a party planner's website, business and leisure travel tips for something I cringe to report they called "bleisure," Kickstarter campaigns, artist profiles, resumes...

Well. You can imagine the array of "personalized" content I was favored with...who, I wonder, does the big data marketing beast think I am?

It definitely helped to switch from Google to Duck Duck Go for a search engine, on Firefox that lets you turn off AI. I did that on May 26th, 2026 when Google announced they were switching to an all AI search engine. Nope. Not only that, but "to do things like recommend a YouTube video you might like" Google started accessing our "images, files, audio and video" from our transactions. I beg your finest pardon? Uh, no you're not. That day I switched to another, non-invasive platform instead of Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. My blog is still on Blogger, but I did two things--I downloaded all the years of Blogger content up until May 26th, and I started duplicating the entries on Diaryland.

Excuse me, let's go back to that, where Google is invading our privacy "to do things like recommend a YouTube video you might like." Yeah, no. I have lots and lots of friends who do that for me. I do not need you to recommend anything for me, Google. Who asked for that?! GTFO of my files. That stuff is nunya bizness, it's not there for you to sell to marketers for "personalization," and that goes double for training your AI using my private files. Honestly, are you crazy?

Anyway. I bought a chair.∎