We’ve all had the experience of looking at a pair of shoes online, then seeing those shoes follow us around the internet. That’s called retargeting. The theory is that you decided not to buy, but you might change your mind. And sometimes it works.

But more often than not, in my experience, retargeting is just silly. I buy my son some hockey equipment as a Christmas gift, for example, and hockey equipment follows me around for months.

The purchase is done. I’m over it. Stop bothering me.

Here’s another example. I was reading Scott Adams on Trump (if you’re not, you should be), and this was in the margin.

Not only do I “already own” the book on the bottom left of the ad, I wrote it.

In a way, that’s somewhat comforting. It means that the data truly is anonymized. Amazon knows perfectly well that I wrote that book (since they have the kindle version), so that means their cookie pool is not quite precise enough to be that spookily accurate.