Creepy

So, I'm kind of sick and tired of banner ads for TheGodMovie.com that keep cropping up on nytimes.com. Sorry, but, as much of a sceptic as I am, I'm not an atheist, and I'm really sick and tired of seeing this ad float onto my webpages. I don't want to suppress freedom of speech, either, but, at my wits end, I clicked on "Feedback" to see if there was something to report along the lines of "This ad really pisses me off."

No such luck. Out of curiosity, however, (and having read a reference to it a few days earlier) I click on "Visit the Ads Preferences Manager to learn more and customize which interest-based ads you see." I figured it would bring up some general categories of ads that Google put on pages that I could opt out of in case I really didn't particularly like cooking or something like that. Here's what I got instead:

Ford makes pretty good cars that, with the exception of the Mustang, are pretty lame. So they're wrong about that. But not much else. I guess they culled this from my New York Times traffic--not that difficult, considering they run the ads on the site, and plenty of other sites I must have surfed. But now I'm starting to understand why people freak out over Googleistic monopolies and privacy rights. 'Cause this is a pretty good list of my interests. I honestly, for all my nerdiness, never knew they could actually pull this stuff off.

You can opt out of tracking (at least with your current cookie) with Google, which I will do NOW, but Big Brother is still out there. It wouldn't surprise me if the tracking starts up again if I delete my cookie and surf a Google site again. Or if Yahoo, Microsoft, and God knows who else can do this kind of information tracking. Or if Google combines my Gmail, search data, maybe even Blogger to create a real good picture of me. It's not paranoid to think like that anymore. Now, right now, they aren't doing anything other than compiling data for ads and marketing. But what nefarious deeds does that leave the door open to?