At work the other day I was tracking down a network issue with my company’s webserver. During this process I briefly visited the website of our hosting provider, Media Temple.
At lunchtime that day I was scrolling through my Facebook feed when I found this suggested post (I mean, “ad”):
I must have had my Facebook page open in another browser tab when I visited Media Temple’s site and one of the site’s plugins queried my Facebook cookie and sent that information on to Facebook, which kindly showed me a Media Temple ad.
The same thing happened a few months ago when I visited the website of my friend’s company, TeamSnap. That very day I began getting TeamSnap suggested posts in my Facebook feed.
It seems like everywhere you go on the Internet, someone’s putting a cookie on your computer and watching where you go. I think I’ll be “opting out” of this with a few good browser tools.