Photography, History and Whatever Else Strikes my Fancy.
One of the things I love about LiveJournal is that with my paid account I am not subjected to a barrage of irritating advertisements. On the flip-side though, Facebook's attempts at targeted advertising amuse the hell out of me.
I intentionally don't give Facebook much to work with, and have on occasion gone out of my way to confound their data-mining. At one point, after adding a few hundred completely random words picked for their obscurity to my "interests" I successfully confused their ad-bot into complete silence. I actually went about a month or so with no advertising. That was nice, but of course it didn't last. Soon enough I started getting the default ads that go to completely blank accounts and simply changed my "interests" to the phrase "Subverting the data-mining operations of marketing-weasels!" in ROT13.
The only things they've got to mine are my age, gender, that I live in Vancouver, and my relationship status. Now this is where it gets funny. Since my relationship status changed from "engaged" to "married" the ads I have been getting have changed.
While my status was "engaged" most of the ads that came up were for local wedding photographers and the occasional ad looking for men over 40 to participate in market research. Now that my status is "married" and I remain over 40, suddenly all the advertising is for real-estate, home repairs, and erectile dysfunction.
Oringinal post: http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/890512.html