There are a lot of complaints about Google ads in the comments – especially right wing ads that are triggered by something in the text, or ads that seem creepy because they’re related to a search you did that’s completely unrelated to Balloon-Juice content. If you have a Google account and want more information about who Google thinks you are, then this link should take you to a page showing what ad categories Google thinks you want to see, as well as their estimate of your age and gender. In my case, it was pretty close, except they had me pegged as a few years younger. You can also opt-out of ads from that link, but that just means that they won’t use your demographics when they push ads your way.
Here’s an open thread.
r€nato
I love seeing (and clicking on) ads for Mitt or RuPaul or Newt. I’m glad to help them waste their money.
Or just get an adblocker. Flash ads slow down your ‘puter anyway.
dmsilev
Hmmm. Google thinks I’m about 20 years older than I actually am and that I live about two states over from where I actually live.
Well done, chaps!
MattF
Hmm. Cookies on two computers I use have somewhat different information. My work computer thinks it’s in New Hampshire. Go figure.
kdaug
Damn. They think I’m 10-20 years older than I am.
Peej01
They have my age right, but my gender wrong. Apparently I’m not supposed to visit sports-related sites if I’m female.
Zifnab
Probably all those SW:TOR and WOW searches are throwing it off.
amk
FF+adblock plus +disable cookies = FU to google
balconesfault
So does Balloon-Juice get revenue when I hit one of these links?
If so, I’m more than happy to take 10 seconds to have wingnutnewsdaily, or americans for billionaire tax cuts, or the publisher of “How Obama will Kill your Dog”, help subsidize this fine venture.
Warren Terra
It has me pegged about two decades older than I am. And it thinks I’m excessively interested in Iowa, while I foresee having not the slightest interest in Iowa for the best part of the next four years.
mistermix
@amk: Your equation is a bit off:
FF+adblock plus +disable cookies = FU to google and no money for Balloon Juice
KyCole
Google thinks I’m about 10 years older and a male. Guess I need to visit some fashion sites or something.
Skipjack
Ha that link is hilarious. Google thinks I’m a 65+ year old man who is into Rap and Hip-Hop. Off by about three or four decades, and I don’t listen to rap. I used to think their algorithms would come alive and take over the Internet and then the world.
PaulW
Google thinks I’m 18-24. I bet it’s those damn webcomics I read.
Glenda
@Peej01: I have the same problem with them getting the gender wrong. I’m wondering if it is the sports sites (especially nfl.com) or because I’m a programmer who does a whole lot of googling for proper syntax and macros that others have already written.
Interesting how they try to deduce gender. It does explain why I see some of the ads I do that are of no interest at all because they think I’m a guy.
FridayNext
They have my age right, but they think I live in Oregon, when I am, in fact, in Florida. My guess is that they pegged me for a Duck when I went searching for Steve Prefontaine videos on YouTube on his birthday which was Wednesday.
Pre!Pre!Pre!
Satanicpanic
Pretty close on the demographics, but I don’t know why it thinks I have any interest in home furnishings.
Linda Featheringill
Google is wrong about my age, my gender, and my residence.
I guess I’d better not rely on them to set up dates for me.
:-)
mistermix
@balconesfault: AFAIK (I know nothing about the ads on the site, so this is a general answer): The advertiser chooses whether they pay per click or per impression. If they pay per click, B-J gets a cut when you click. If they pay per impression, it doesn’t matter whether you click or not, just if you view the page.
There’s no need to game the system by clicking. Just turn off your ad blocker when you view B-J and you’re supporting the site.
Edit: This is the way it works with Google Ads. Maybe John gets a cut of the other, non-Google ads if you click, I have no idea.
Linda Featheringill
Looking at the comments above, I really doubt that Google understands women.
JPL
Mine was vague. Gender was wrong, the age gave a ten year span and I live in the USA.
Redshift
@balconesfault:
As I understand it, the advertiser definitely doesn’t get charged per click, but I’m unsure if it affects BJ’s revenue. (I remember JC said he did get more if people signed petitions listed in the left column, but there you’re giving them contact information, not just clicking.) It may make it more likely that the wingnuts’ ads will show up here and waste their money, though.
mistermix
@Linda Featheringill: A bunch of mostly male engineers don’t understand women? Say it isn’t so!
Redshift
@PaulW:
Doesn’t seem to help me; it thinks I’m ten years older than I am. Though I read webcomics more on my work computer.
Linda Featheringill
Oh, oh, oh!
I use Google heavily to help with medical transcription and one of the clients of my group is a busy urologist. Most of his patients are male. So I do a fair amount of searching for terms related to prostates, etc. Maybe that’s the problem.
Tokyokie
Dang, Google has my age, gender and state on the money. Need to start doing stuff to cross them up.
Cheryl from Maryland
Wow — Google’s algorithms are way off to think that shopping at web based women’s only clothing sites makes one a male.
kdaug
Now, to be fair, they did get the “Curmudgeonly Troglodyte” part right, but I ain’t into ballet or origami.
amk
@mistermix: tough titties.
Cathy W
This is not the first automated gender-detector to tell me I’m actually a man. I deleted that, and now maybe if I spend a lot of time reading about knitting, it’ll stop showing me ads involving underdressed women.
It doesn’t seem to want to venture a guess about where I live, although my ads are usually targeted pretty well.
IrishGirl
@Tokyokie: Same with me! they think I am 55 to 64 and Male….wow, just goes to show you how their assumptions can be way off
rlrr
When I publish a post about Newt Gingrich, Google puts ads for marriage counseling on my web site.
Percysowner
Oh Google, I’m flattered. I’m a 58 year old female, but Google puts me at 18-24. It also seems to think I float above the earth, because it doesn’t list a residence.
I guess I really am among the very young at heart. The following phrase proves I’m old.
Bridget
They think I’m a 60-year-old male. About 15 years too old, and wrong gender. Can’t wait for all the Viagra ads I bet will be coming my way.
jibeaux
Ha, they think I’m 20+ years older, and male. I guess I’m letting my grumpy show on the interwebs.
Persia
I’m all disappointed now.
jibeaux
@Cathy W: I’m on ravelry, love to knit. I still get the underdressed women. And I’d really Esquire to offer an option to subscribe only to their politics blog updates and not their whole magazine. Reading Charlie Pierce does not mean I’m interested in being notified when there’s a new interview with a Cowboys cheerleader.
Pavonis
Google thinks my interests are exotic pets and anime. Weird. And it doesn’t even try to guess my age and gender.
beltane
Google thinks I’m an 18-24 year old male based on the fact that I visit a lot of science blogs and sites related to books and literature. What, may I ask, do “normal” females do on the internet?
beltane
@rlrr: Once on a Gingrich thread I received an add for a dating website for married people. Quite telling isn’t it?
RossInDetroit
Yup. That’s me.
Luzeelu
They have my age in the correct range, but they think I’m a man. I’m not.
burnspbesq
Meanwhile, Andrew’s BFF Alex Massie understands the Republicans all too well.
spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/7605574/romney-is-grim-but-newt-gingrich-remains-impossible.thtml
I particularly like the part about supporting Romney because he is “merely ridiculous,” while Gingrich is “preposterous.”
Odie Hugh Manatee
From that link:
Under the cookie, nothing. Nothing about me at all on the page. Google ain’t got shit on me…lol!
Now to go revoke temporary permissions for Google… :)
Litlebritdifrnt
@IrishGirl: @IrishGirl:
Me three! 55-64 year old male. They got the interests right though but only had me down for two, I would have thought that environment and animal welfare would have been pretty high up there.
The Moar You Know
That’s a very interesting link, mistermix. Thanks for posting this. Save for my age, they’ve got me otherwise dead to rights.
r€nato
fuckers think I’m 10 years older than I really am. That annoyed me very much!
CaptainFwiffo
Apparently Google has no opinion of me because I block anything and everything from the doubleclick domain, which used to be one of the skeeziest, spammiest advertisers. I guess they’re part of the Google monolith now. They should really stop using that domain; its reputation is not particularly savory. It’s like “YouTube, now enhanced with Bonzai Buddy and RealAudio!”
The Pale Scot
What you can do is use a cookie manager like Cookie Culler for Firefox, you can protect the cookies for the sites you want, and dump everything else, so googlies and Co. have no long term history of you.
hilzoy
I’m a 65+ male with special interests in home improvements and roofing. How they came up with this I have no idea.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Do they allow you to change your gender and age? If so, the women should change the gender so that the algorithm can learn to discrimiate better.
I am studying statistical learning methods. I would love to know what kind of algorithm they are using to do this.
burnspbesq
They did fairly well with me, although I wonder what website visits led them to think I was interested in “talk radio” and “urban & hip-hop.” I only listened to the Tavis Smiley/Cornel West Saturday morning mess on WBGO.org one time.
CaptainFwiffo
Historically, advertisers have had absolutely zero scruples and were long deserving of chastisement. It’s nice that the web has empowered users (through the ability to block anything) to the point that advertisers are actually desperate not to piss people off. It’s a definite power shift in the right direction.
jibeaux
@hilzoy:
Welcome, hilzoy! Everybody should slum it every once in a while.
I’m theorizing based on these comments that maybe it defaults to “older male”. I just don’t see a lot of 55-64 year old men that it thinks I am on my favorite knitting community website.
Cathy W
@jibeaux: If you use a RSS reader, you can follow esquire.com/blogs/politics/politics-rss/ and just get the Politics blog. I was so happy to find that.
deep
I disallow third party cookies on my work browser, so Google has no idea who I am.
Probably a good thing.
jayackroyd
Did anybody opt out?
I said “Aha! Of course I’m gonna opt out!” But I hesitated. It’s not like I’m gonna get fewer ads–just irrelevant ones. This won’t affect the product search driven ads (“I bought the faucet! I’m not buying another one! Please stop.”)which do annoy me.
So why opt out? If I am not opting out, why do I care?
Damned at Random
Nailed me on age and interests but they think I’m male. I blame JoeMyGod. I expect they think I’m gay as well.
RossInDetroit
Thanks for the link. I’m going to post this on Facebook & stand back. The outrage level has been so low lately I need to get my ‘bookies riled up.
dswagz
Added 10 years to my age, got my sex right, and my surfing history is what it is….Wondering how they intend to market to the “Skeeved” and “Worried” demographic, though.
eataTREE
Google thought I was 15 years younger, and into classic rock. I don’t know where I’ve gone wrong in my life…
RossInDetroit
I use an ad blocker selectively. I know the ads bring revenue to sites that I read, but I can’t read a page with moving stuff on it. It triggers my vertigo.
geg6
Holy shit, have they got me wrong.
Bad enough that they’ve aged me by 2 years, but they also have me pegged as a hip-hop lovin’ male.
I never listen to or google hip-hop for any reason whatsoever. I’m a fucking punk fan, fer chrissake. And just what made them think I’m a guy? It’s not like I don’t google girly stuff. Fuck.
Jeebus. Google sucks.
burnspbesq
@geg6:
If the algorithm thinks you’re male because you visit “girly” sites, I wonder what that tells us about the social lives of its authors.
Tim in SF
Why on Earth would I want to not see ads of people or organizations you don’t like? Every time I see one, I click on it. When I click on it, I know I’ve just cost that organization somewhere between a dollar and twenty-five bucks! And, at the same time, I’m funding Balloon-Juice!
WIN WIN
Soprano2
They think I’m a man, hahahaha the joke’s on them.
maya
They don’t know anything about me since I don’t have a cookie. They ask if I wanted to “opt in”. I think not.
When I first got a computer, some 7 years ago, and didn’t know squat diddly about it I happened upon Kim Kommando on the radio. She was pretty good, I thought, so I signed up for her email tips and have really learned a lot from them. She just had a fairly comprehensive run down on the Google privacy issue and what to do about it. Of course, all you guys are experts and don’t need no blonde from Arizona to tell you stuff (she has a team) anyway. But, just in case there are internet newbies around…. check her out. Use the BING though. Not der google.
rlrr
@maya:
Use the BING though. Not der google.
Because Microsoft would never do anything evil…
James Hulsey
@kdaug: Me too. I guess I should start visiting TMZ.com more.
Michael D.
HEH! Google thinks I am a 65+ year old female.
JPL
If I click on Balloon Juice through Chrome, they have a profile although it is not entirely accurate.
On Firefox though they got nothin.
Mnemosyne
Just out of curiosity, did the algorithm peg any woman here as actually being a woman? Mine came up as “male” as well, and 10 years older than my actual age. And yet the Google server sends me ads for knitting websites.
RoonieRoo
Wow! Off on age by 20 years and wrong gender. Do they get it right for anyone?
maya
@rlrr: There’s AVG search for the really astute.
Villago Delenda Est
I’m not complaining, I just think it’s hilarious when the ads seem to come up the way they do. Why Santorum, Paul, and Gingrich Moneybomb ads show up on a site where those guys are derisively mocked incessantly astounds me.
I get Obama ads too, so there’s that.
Kola Noscopy
I just realized I have gotten really good at simply not seeing the ads about ninety percent of the time. Anyone else have this going on?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@maya: Like being on Bing really makes a difference.
For those who want to know, they are taking the information from people who give it in their profile – such as gender and age – and group it with cookie information about the sites they visit. Then they basically use the site information for others and try to guess the stuff they don’t know.
Based on all of you women they guessed as male, the algorithm also seems to be pointing out that women who don’t visit female oriented sites are reluctant to point out their gender online.
DanielX
Your categories
Below you can review the interests and inferred demographics that Google has associated with your cookie. You can remove or edit these at any time.
Beauty & Fitness – Hair Care
News – Politics – Campaigns & Elections
Your demographics
No demographic categories are associated with your ads preferences so far. You can add or edit demographics at any time.
Beauty & Fitness – Hair Care?
Makes me wonder if someone else has been using my computer, since my only interest in hair care (other than keeping it clean) is trying to keep what I’ve got left. How the hell did they come up with that?
Anya
They have my age, location and my interest right, but not my gender. What man is interested in beauty, shoes and reads beauty magazines. OH, they think I am a gay man. Thanks Gawker.
Mnemosyne
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
What counts as a “female oriented site”? I’m pretty sure that not too many men are shopping at the Sephora or Scrapbooking.com sites, but the Google server does send me ads for them.
different-church-lady
I wonder if Google is ever going to figure out they’re giving people the creeps.
Or maybe they’ve already figured it out and they just don’t care.
maya
@DanielX: They think you’re Calista G.
schrodinger's cat
@JPL: Same here. The profile on Chrome, matches my husband, since he uses Chrome and I use Firefox.
ETA: I have No Script installed on Firefox
different-church-lady
I’m clearly doing something wrong with my life: they’ve got me 10 years older than I am.
cmorenc
@MattF:
Google apparently thinks my daughter, who was an exchange student in Denmark from January through July 2010, is still there because large parts of her Google home page are still in Danish (not merely ads, but the webpage menus, buttons, etc themselves!) Although she never really got fluent in Danish, she knows what the Danish words on the home page mean and thinks it’s kind of cute that they persist. So though she hasn’t actively done anything to make or keep the page Danish rather than English, neither has she tried to change the default back to English from Danish.
Villago Delenda Est
OK, age and gender, pretty close. But locality? Iowa? Pennsylvania? Say what? Only 1500 miles to the east off, at the closest.
Also, go figure how interested a 55-64 male is in urban and hip hop? I’m an old fogey…I’m into the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for the love of Elvis…
HEY! YOU! GET OFF OF MY CLOUD!
Mnemosyne
@Anya:
Funniest part: it looks like the only person here that Google has identified as a woman is … a gay man. Assuming I’m remembering Michael D.‘s demographics correctly, of course.
RossInDetroit
Ad targeting is a ridiculously haphazard practice today, with laughable results.
But ads are where all the money comes from. It’s going to get a lot better, because there’s so much to be gained by better targeting. And when it does, you will come to hate your browser.
Linda Featheringill
@Michael D.: #68
Actually being a 65+ year old female is not all bad.
different-church-lady
@Linda Featheringill:
I say, fixed, that is…
different-church-lady
@DanielX:
It’s probably linked to any mention of Romney.
FormerSwingVoter
Open thread?
WE DEMAND TUNCH PICTURES. The more irritated he is, the better.
He’s just so adorable when he’s filled with hate.
Mnemosyne
I copied the same link to Safari and it at least got my gender right (though my age is still off by 10 years). I do more of my shopping and non-political-blog reading on Safari, so that may be why it’s more accurate.
CaptainFwiffo
OK, here’s the deal. I’d like to permit advertising on a subset of sites that I don’t mistrust as much. But I never want to see flash ads because flash is shit and will eventually crash my browser, and I also don’t appreciate unexpected noises or animations. I don’t want to disable flash entirely, because I still need it for a few things and want to see YouTube videos and stuff, even though that means my browser will be crashing periodically.
There are all sorts of options for blocking specific advertisers, or setting demographic information, but there’s no option for blocking flash. I use NoScript, but it’s all or nothing. Obviously I can’t block javascript from Google entirely, but there’s no option with NoScript to block flash but not javascript from a domain. That wouldn’t work anyhow, because I don’t want to block Google videos.
Given the wide distrust and instability of flash, and their seeming willingness to add all sorts of opt-outs, why is there no opt-out-of-flash-ads option?
different-church-lady
@jayackroyd:
If you’re like me, you’re already seeing irrelevant ads.
Angela
They have my age right, 45-54, but say I am a male, although I am quite certain I am a woman.
It appears that being interested in politics and international news is not in the equation for females.
scav
O! my GSD, I’m on a site surrounded by people don’t conform to cheap stereotypes! The Horror.
Villago Delenda Est
@Angela:
Do you need a second opinion on that?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mnemosyne: Sites visited by a significant number of the people they know are female. I can’t get more specific than that because google doesn’t get any more specific than that, no one does any more. The algorithm does some (rather interesting) things with the data and it returns an algorithm it can use to try to identify data it doesn’t know. But these algorithms don’t really allow for much understanding of why these choices are made. And by interesting I mean the way it does the number crunching.
different-church-lady
@CaptainFwiffo:
Flash ads? What are those?
DZ
Google says I’m 34, female, live in California and listen to rap and hip hop. In fact, I am 64, male, live in Oregon and I like Blues, early Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin when I’m stoned. Not close
DanielX
@maya:
I’ve carefully examined my conscience, and there’s nothing that would make me deserve that. Well, it ought to produce some interesting ads anyway…and possibly useful, you could probably use her hair spray on ordinary clothing and produce regular clothes with all the properties of body armor.
@Anya:
Look on the bright side; they think you’re fabulous with a truly awesome sense of fashion.
Tim in SF
ALWAYS click on ads you hate! It funds balloon-juice and it costs the advertiser money. WIN WIN.
Hold down the control key when you click and it will open in another tab. Wait a few seconds, then close the tab – you’ve never seen the page but you’ve cost the advertiser whatever their bid was for your click. A bid can be a buck up to twenty or thirty bucks, depending on the product.
Nutella
@RossInDetroit:
So far I’ve had good luck with isolating Google. I don’t want them to gather too much info about me, so I use Chrome for GMail and Google Groups and not much else. I use FireFox for browsing and never sign in to my Google account there.
Unfortunately there’s no way any more to isolate my Android phone contacts from the main Google account. I may have to give up Android one of these days.
Anya
@Mnemosyne: I think all of us have one thing in common — interest in politics, and Google cannot fathom that women who are interested in politics exist.
Brian
@Redshift: It has me pegged at more than double my actual age.
jon
I like that it is both right and wrong about me. “I” am into hiphop and classic rock, which only befuddles me until I remember that the music of my youth is now nostalgia. “I” am also older.
Part of me hates this worming into my privacy and categorizing crap. Other parts hate when I get absolutely uninteresting junk ads and junk mail. But as long as I can look at stuff on youtube, have email I don’t have to pay for, they don’t use fucking popup ads or things that make noise, I won’t hate them much. Let them try to sell me crap, as the internet is still the best bargain for any utility ever devised by modern-age humanity. I get access to oodles of stuff, they try to help me out and sell me stuff along the way. If I could pay less for my electric bill by having some ads on the payment site, I’d be okay with that.
slag
@Mnemosyne:
So what you’re saying is that Google doesn’t see women as multi-faceted individuals with diverse interests and abilities but rather as simple, single-minded shoppers.
So, then, they’re definitely an advertising company.
RossInDetroit
There’s a colossal push going on on a number of fronts to collect info on us for advertising purposes. Lots of resources are going into it and many smart people have made this their life’s work. Most internet users will just give up and let advertising companies harvest and target. But if you want to retain your personal privacy and anonymity, expect that to get exponentially harder over the next 5 years.
Anya
@DanielX: I must’ve been a gay man in another life.
ThresherK
What was the archaic saying around the Texas lege?
“If we can’t drink their bourbon, eat their beefsteak, party with their broads (sic), and vote against them anyway, what good are we?”
kdaug
@Linda Featheringill:
You go, Linda.
satby
OT to Google. Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): One thing I want to add, especially considering the comments I am seeing so far, is that no one stares at the list of sites you visit and says “Oh, that person goes to these sites a lot, the person must be a female.” There’s too much data to look at, both from the number of people surfing and the number of sites there are.
To go into more detail, the data is collected in two basic groups, the sites visited, and the information about the person (age, gender, location). The algorithm is fed those, and in some 20-30 dimensional coordinate system – what size that is is determined by the learning algorithm – it plots all of the points, until it starts noticing that certain arrangements of the data cause points to group together in ways that allow predictions of unknown age, gender, and location. This mapping is then used. Unless people start being able to think in 20 dimensions, no person is going to look at the data.
And BTW, google isn’t the only company doing this. Every online company selling ad space, such as Micrsoft and Facebook, is doing this. (That’s the purpose of Bing, so Microsoft can start making ad money.) The stores you visit, all of them, do this with your purchases. The cable companies do this with your viewing habits.
It’s called data mining, and it isn’t going away.
The Pale Scot
@CaptainFwiffo:
If you’re using Firefox, check out the add-ons in you’re “tools” function, there are ad-blockers and Flash blockers along with cookie managers.
And, I started the cookie manager when I realized that Facebook and Twitter cookies were on my machine even though I never go to those sites. Those FB and Twitter links you see on a lot of sites, they’re sticking cookies on you that will reveal your identity if you have a FB page that uses your real name. Anyplace where you use a credit card could do that also.
kdaug
@DanielX:
Back-referencing dead threads? Srsly?
Angela
@Villago Delenda Est: Why do you ask?
slag
@RossInDetroit:
With the FCC leading the way by publishing your home address with every comment you submit to them on the Internet. Your home address. Seriously.
Suffern ACE
I’m a bit dissastisfied with my life at the moment. According to Google, I have the habits of a 54-65 year old man who lives in North Dakota.
So should I adopt this identity? Own it and live my Dakotaness to the max, better than any North Dakotan who has ever lived?
RossInDetroit
@The Pale Scot:
Yup. When I read a Pierce piece on Esquire the comment box at the bottom pops up with my real name and Facebook icon. This is deeply creepy and although I could override it, it keeps me from wanting to comment in a lot of places.
Villago Delenda Est
@Angela:
I thought I was being snarky, but on second thought, that didn’t come across very well. You couldn’t see my grin when I typed it.
My apologies for any offense taken.
catclub
@CaptainFwiffo: Maybe you should have one browser instance with flash and such allowed, and one without. Not sure how the profile can deal with this, but it _should_ be able to.
Or two different browsers.
different-church-lady
@RossInDetroit:
My favorite commentary on such things: achewood.com/index.php?date=11182010
Angela
@Villago Delenda Est: I was being snarky right back. I thought the answer 3 pregnancies and 6 years of breast feeding might be TMI ! No offense taken.
different-church-lady
@Villago Delenda Est: Humor: it doesn’t always work as expected.
RossInDetroit
@different-church-lady:
I knew exactly which Achewood that was before I clicked! I have to think that stand-alone was based on an Onstad personal experience. The scenario is exaggerated but in a few years the reality might be very close to that.
Yevgraf
Interesting. My visits to FReak Republic skewed my age way up.
WaterGirl
@CaptainFwiffo: Get ClicktoFlash. Instead of seeing flash, you get a box that says “Flash”. If you click it, you get to see the flash – otherwise you just get the box. It’s perfect.
Edit: there are also settings, so you can indicate if there are any sites where you DO want to see flash.
RossInDetroit
Cory Doctorow has written about general purpose computing going the way of the dinosaur and special purpose devices replacing it. Considering the growth in portable platforms with proprietary applications it’s not impossible that the bulk of content access and communication in a near future could be special purpose purchased apps, and the wider free web/browser realm could become an ad-infested ghetto for those who can’t afford to avoid it.
cmorenc
@CaptainFwiffo:
As someone who’s written a bit of software myself, I’m baffled why anything distributed by such a major player as Adobe and so widely used across the net for a fairly considerable time now should still be plagued by such frequent crashes, especially since the cause of the crashes is almost certainly intertwined with fatal memory leaks. If you look at e.g. process memory use in Task Manager when a Chrome window running Flash has just crashed, the memory usage is HUGE. The more cumulative Flash usage by your Browser during a session, the more the memory usage tends to accumulate, if you periodically monitor such in Task Manager; the instances where Flash doesn’t crash are where it does release the memory at appropriate times.
Of course, purely from an external view it’s difficult to say exactly what systematic programmer (or programming platform) flaw or fundamental design flaw is actually responsible for producing the crashes, i.e. whether memory leakage is the cause itself or else just a substantial symptom of whatever is causing the crash rather than memory hogging or leakage itself being the immediate responsible cause. But whatever it is, you’d think Adobe should have a handle on this by now.
shortstop
@Warren Terra: I don’t know why they think I’m Iowa-obsessed, either.
DanielX
@Anya:
Anything is possible, I bet Jonah Goldberg (aka Jabba the Hack) is convinced he was Richard the Lionhearted in a previous life. Who just happened to be a gay man…
The Pale Scot
@CaptainFwiffo:
And, I started the cookie manager when I realized that Facebook and Twitter cookies were on my machine even though I never go to those sites. Those FB and Twitter links you see on a lot of sites, they’re sticking cookies on you that will reveal your identity if you have a FB page that uses your real name. Anyplace where you use a credit card could do that also.
Mouse Tolliver
They grossly overestimated my age by almost 20 years. And they underestimated my interest in pr0n.
orogeny
Got to admit that I don’t really understand how Google tracks people. I’m on the Web 10-12 hours per day, 5-6 days a week. I have a Gmail account and a Facebook page. I do a lot of online shopping, mainly at Amazon, but at a fair number of other retailers as well. I don’t do anything special as far as privacy goes…I use Firefox, allow cookies and delete my history after each session. I run Adblick and Flashblock. Google says that I don’t have a cookie and they have nothing on me. How does this work?
Elizabelle
@Michael D.:
Interesting, since it sounds like Google cannot discern gender for females. I wonder what you tripped.
I wonder if any of us are skewing older because we check dead tree news sites for our facts (like the NY Times, etc.)
I was delighted Google thinks I am interested in science.
That is from trying to keep up with some of the whipsmart commenters and frontpagers here. Lots of computer searching to find out what you’re talking about!
signed,
Elizabelle the old guy
twiffer
@Warren Terra: hey, me too, though i’m apparently interested in arkansas.
Jon O.
Is anybody else having problems with the home page serving an old page? Eg. The first time I came to this site this morning, the top article was from right after the debate. Being as I wasn’t on this site at 10PM last night, I have no idea why that would be.
CaptainFwiffo
I don’t want to use Clicktoflash or Flashblock or some other flash-blocking plugin because they either conflict with NoScript, or require an additional nag on top of the NoScript nag when I want to whitelist a site. Besides, more plugins always make Firefox even slower and shittier than it already is.
Anyway, the whitelists for Flashblock or whatever won’t work because the flash ads I want to hide are coming from the same domains (google) as the flash content and video I want to see.
If Google and other advertisers care so much about not offending me with their ads and targeting me by demographic and giving me the ability to block specific ads, why don’t they just give me a freaking option to categorically disable the stupid ads that crash my browser? I cannot click on them if my browser crashes! Seriously, I’d much rather that sites I like get some ad revenue, but if I have to block all ads to block flash ads, I’ll go ahead and do it.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
google has me older and can’t guess where i am. this is good.
The Moar You Know
@Jon O.: I’ve been experiencing this with all the pages here for over a week. Pretty sure the problem is with this communist Norwegian browser I’m using, but it’s frustrating and this is the only site with the issue.
kideni
@KyCole: It added a decade or so and made me a dude, too. I guess only guys go to political sites. I have no idea why they think I shop for children’s clothing (um, I have no kids and any shopping I do is for women’s stuff or for pet supplies). Also, they’re not sure if I’m in Wisconsin or Massachusetts.
Villago Delenda Est
@RossInDetroit:
Oh, computing prognosticators have been predicting that for two decades, and we’re still waiting…and laughing at the prognosticators. If people wanted dumb terminals, we’d all be on a VMS system run from some mainframe in Illinois or something. Nagonnahappin.
MikeJ
Google ads have no idea who I am. I use the cookie monster firefox extension, which makes it easy to keep cookies disabled and then only selectively reënable them.
Villago Delenda Est
@Angela:
3 pregnancies doesn’t prove a darn thing. It’s like Obama’s birth certificate. Even when it’s slapped in my face, I don’t believe it.
beltane
I checked the other computer I share with my husband and that one says we are male, but old (55-64) and with an interest in hip-hop and reggaeton because nothing screams OLD MAN! like an interest in reggaeton (my husband actually listens to dub-step but that is a minor point).
What does one have to do to be recognized as female by Google, browse exclusively at weight-loss sites?
The Pale Scot
@CaptainFwiffo
If you’re using Firefox, check out the add-ons in you’re “tools” function, there are ad-blockers and Flash blockers along with cookie managers.
And, I started the cookie manager when I realized that Facebook and Twitter cookies were on my machine even though I never go to those sites. Those FB and Twitter links you see on a lot of sites, they’re sticking cookies on you that will reveal your identity if you have a FB page that uses your real name. Anyplace where you use a credit card could do that also.
Interesting that all of sudden BJ is barely loading for me, anyone else having problems?
Yevgraf
I admit to be somewhat disappointed that it didn’t peg me as someone who is conservative and has amorous intentions toward midgets.
Mark S.
Way off on my age; think I live either in Massachusetts or Tampa (neither are close). Tampa? Is that because I’ve clicked Politifact a couple of times? I also cannot fathom why they think I’m into campers and RV’s.
Wasn’t there something a couple of years ago about the government using data mining to find terrorists? If what they were using sucks as bad as that, I hope they junked the program. But I’m sure they didn’t.
different-church-lady
Would anyone reading this comment thread still want to pay Google for advertising, seeing how inaccurate their metrics are?
Freakin’ dot-com smoke and mirrors: they ain’t dead.
The Pale Scot
Apparently my comment was loaded even though the page didn’t, sorry folks.
Anya
@DanielX: And you’re comparing me to Jonah Goldberg because……?
The Pale Scot
@CaptainFwiffo
If you’re using Firefox, check out the add-ons in you’re “tools” function, there are ad-blockers and Flash blockers along with cookie managers.
And, I started the cookie manager when I realized that Facebook and Twitter cookies were on my machine even though I never go to those sites. Those FB and Twitter links you see on a lot of sites, they’re sticking cookies on you that will reveal your identity if you have a FB page that uses your real name. Anyplace where you use a credit card could do that also.
Interesting that all of sudden BJ is barely loading.
WereBear
Bwahaha! They have my gender wrong. ‘Cause I’m a geek. But hey, as long as it doesn’t happen in person, I’m good.
Tim in SF
If you think you’re anonymous online, you’re most likely wrong.
Each browser has a fingerprint, most fingerprints are specific enough to ID you as unique in all the world. Version? Choice of fonts? Addons? Screen color, depth and resolution? OS version? Time Zone? With just some of these, you can get pretty specific.
If your browser is unique, then you have zero anonymity.
panopticlick.eff.org/
DanielX
@Anya:
NOT comparing you to Jonah (god forbid), just enhancing the “anything is possible” thought….
Mark S.
Apparently Google doesn’t think women use the Internet. Maybe they do; it’s a demographic they’re just not interested in.
Donut
This has probably been pointed out by someone already, but I would guess that most of us who visit B-J regularly are basically liberal political junkies, and lately, every blog in Leftblogistan, as well as the Wingnut blogs, have had more in in content about Republicans than Democrats.
Google thinks I am a 55-64 year old man probably mostly because it’s noticed I have consumed content about Romney and Gingrich 3,000,000,000 times in the last few weeks.
It’s not necessarily a faulty assumption, but hey, software engineers are not gods.
I also recently switched to searching with Bing (I think recent changes to Google have dumbed down their search), but I use Chrome as default browser. I have no idea how they gather data if you’re using their browser but not search…
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady:
So true.
Maybe they’re just messing with us.
HeartlandLiberal
Firefox (keep up to date with latest version)
Install the following add ons:
NoScript
BetterPrivacy
Ghostery
Set NoScript to not trust anything by default. Trust the sites you choose to once you feel comfortable, and where you want to support their advertising.
Be prepared to occasionally have to turn off BetterPrivacy and especially Ghostery; but consider setting them to simply delete the h*ll out of all the cookies including the super cookies they can find every time you close your browser.
Of course this makes things less easy. But then, should you really be storing your passwords, and leaving your browsing history for any site you visit to examine? You decide. It is your life. Well some of it. A little bit. Still. Maybe.
HeartlandLiberal
Meant to include in prior FireFox comment (which took about four minutes to post, and even then I had to force reload the main page and come back here to find it did post – site perofrmance problems?), that I went to the link at Google, and Google knew NOTHING about me. I am assuming because of how I delete all cookies (or try to, the b*stards keep finding new ways to avoid your deleting them) after each browser session.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
I’m going to look at this through a positive lens: Tomorrow, I will start acting like a 55-year-old male.
Off by about 15 years, but at least now I’ll have an excuse for being crotchety and voting Republican…
Michele C
@KyCole: Me too, but do I really want to visit fashion sites? :D
Libby's person
Thank you for that link! I opted out; I find it creepy to see, say, the boots I just looked at following me around in ads for several days…
Google had me mis-identified as ‘male’ – I’m trying to decide what to think about that!
JR in WVa
Way back my wife surfed some expensive bags, like maybe… Hermes? or some famous brand of leather bags, she had one and a seam tore. For a couple of weeks ads for the specific bags she actually looked at followed her around the web.
I choked cookies to death a couple of times,, and fixed that for her. It did creep her out a little.
RossinDetroit
@Villago Delenda Est:
It’s easy to see it already happening. Most people don’t need a desktop or laptop computer with a typewriter keyboard to do many of the things that use Internet data. Those functions are migrating to special purpose apps. And it makes sense because as technologies evolve they diversify.
In 20 years, or sooner, the conventional desktop computer will look like the Model T, which was replaced by a variety of much more specialized vehicles.
In the ’70s when the home computer revlution started, we thought that one computer would control everything in your house some day. This was based on the business mainframe model. What happened instead is that everything in your house got its own cheap limited-purpose computer.
The browser based model of Internet use has basically topped out. A few years ago it was determined that the bulk of internet traffic was machines talking to other machines. New functions and traffic will use the ‘tubes as a backbone and have interfaces specific to the application. You’ll no more need to use a web browser to watch a movie than you need to gap the points on your car’s ignition or shovel coal into your home’s furnace, both of which vanished within the last generation.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@cmorenc:
Adobe specializes in crashware. I say that being a longtime regular user of Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and such. Premiere is the worst, IMO. One version, PP 1.5, required me to rename the main executable to run! The damned thing kept crashing so I contacted Adobe and they told me to rename the .exe and sure enough, it worked.
You have to constantly save your projects or risk losing it in one of the regular crashes Premiere loves to throw at you. They never fix the problem until the next ‘version’ when they also introduce the next batch of problems to deal with. It still crashes, just in new ways!
I’ve spent a lot of money on their stuff and while I still use it I know the parameters I have to operate in to keep my work safe from their product.
Too bad they bought Macromedia. They fucked up a good product.
b-psycho
Politics and Arts & Entertainment…correct.
Male…yup!
45-54…nope, try 29.
Beauty and fitness…not at all.
Plus it completely ignored my obvious interest in video games, particularly fighters and shooters.
Part of the reason I use adblock, other than being annoyed with intrusive ads that automatically play sound or expand over shit I’m trying to click on, is that the ads left over after that are shit I could care less about. If they’re going to throw up ads, at least pander to me a bit.
AA+ Bonds
Libyans fed up with lack of progress:
AA+ Bonds
Also: who the fuck hasn’t opted out of Google’s tracking by now
otto
Weird. For some reason it says I like man on dog action, and I am into swinging with multiple wives. It also says that I like to force myself on women who work for me.
Interestingly enough, it also says that I am a devoutly religious person who gives generously when my church makes me give.
The oddest thing, perhaps, is this: It says that I am a confused old man with conspiratorial leanings.
Weird.
Yours,
The Republican Party