Terrifying in-app ads are reading my keystrokes and I can’t even spel propperlie
I’m starving. Who fancies a quick snake?
A friend has the willies. I know this because he went on Facebook to tell us about them. He’s not normally the kind to get the willies, but willies is what he has.
Hang on, it might not have been Facebook. Maybe it was X or LinkedIn or BlueSky or BrownArse or something else. Are we talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s willies or Elon Musk’s willies? You know what? It doesn’t matter any more because all social media has contorted itself into one identical amorphous mass. For all I care, the bosses of Meta and X can fight each other over my friend’s willies. They nearly did over each other’s, after all.
American readers of this column may be disappointed to learn that my friend is neither a fellow of loose morals nor is he, as far as I am aware, multitudinally superappendaged. The expression “to get the willies” means being unnerved by something. Replace “willies” with “creeps”.
He was typing a comment saying that he tends to travel with only carry-on baggage these days. He claims that the ad block in the right-hand pane instantly changed to one for luggage. Here’s the creepy bit: he says the ad changed while he was still typing, before tapping Enter to publish the post.
Double creepy was that he uses an ad-blocker. It would seem that both the previous ad and the new ad forcefully penetrated his protective layer and thrust their way onto his screen. Typical willies.
Most of us have experienced something like this, albeit not in real time, in which something you order, browse or even mistakenly click on quickly becomes the subject of a manic obsession on the part of your social media app feeds from that moment onwards.
I was going to say it’s like the old days of Amazon, which notoriously used to propose bizarre purchase suggestions based on a single item you bought out of the blue years ago while ignoring stuff you ordered much more frequently. Except it’s no longer the old days and Amazon is still doing it. Most of my Amazon purchases are cables and adapters, but Bezos has been determined – for literally decades – to sell me a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The man just won’t let it go.
Suggestions based on purchase history provide amusement but my friend’s willies were caused by what he perceived to be a bespoke ad in a third-party app updating in real time based on his keystrokes, as he typed them. Is this possible? (Yes.) Is this allowed? (Ah, now you’re asking…)
Back in the stone age when the music industry could support weekly printed newspapers in the UK such as Melody Maker, Sounds and NME, I’d flick through page after page of ads for gigs, record releases and trendy gear, and I’d absolutely love it. Printed advertising! It was great! Why? Because the ads made sense: they were trying to sell me albums, trendy apparel and gig tickets – stuff that I was interested in due to the fact that I was reading a music paper.
In the modern disruptive world, however, browsing an online music site is just as likely to reveal ads for axle grinders, remote-controlled blinds, retirement plans and plastic toys for preschoolers. Digital advertising is utter bollocks. And here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter whether you block the cookies or not. They’ll serve up shite regardless.
On that note, national regulators are finally catching up with the rest of us complaining about the lack of options among the cookie options when entering a website. No doubt you have experienced those sites that won’t take ‘no’ for an answer and try to force you to switch off each and every one of its hundreds of ad-sharing cookies one by one, the intention being to wear you down so that you eventually give up and click ‘Accept All’ just to make it stop.
This is a red herring. It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference whether you click ‘Accept All’ or ‘Reject All’. What bothers me is the so-called ‘Essential cookies only’ option that isn’t an option at all because you can’t opt out of it. To me, “essential” means things such as food, water and shelter. To the site, “essential” means tracking your every fucking keystroke and stealing this data from you so they can sell it back to you.
Why else would they insist on force-feeding you these cookies? You certainly don’t need cookies for a website to function; only to track what visitors are doing, where they were before they arrived and where they decide to go next. “Essential”, my arse.
Ad blockers usually help but they also tend to mess up the layout, which I find distracting, especially in an app viewed on a smartphone. The problem is that if I unblock the ads, their algorithms don’t bother evaluating my preferences in a measured way so much as develop an instant fixation on the next thing I click on, then refuse to be talked out of it, ever.
The last time I disabled my ad blocker, quite a while ago, I lazily clicked on a Google ad for men’s wallets. For years afterwards, it was wallets wallets wallets… in every app, on every website, every-bloody-where I went. Leather ones, fabric ones, plastic RFID-blocking ones; slot-type, concertina-type, flip-flop type; tiny compact formats for trouser pockets; bulky formats designed to hold a passport, travel documents, notepad, pen, smartphone, Black & Decker workbench and power tools. Every ad on every page wanted me to buy a wallet.
I believe I must have let my guard down recently and ticked ‘Allow All Cookies’ on a site with the ad blocker disabled and foolishly entered my date of birth when registering for something. I can only imagine this triggered klaxons in the hollowed-out volcano from where dynamic ads are distributed. Realising that I was nearer retirement age than my penchant for The Very Hungry Caterpillar had previously suggested, the evil ad minions immediately ceased all wallet ads.
Now, I get wall-to-wall ads for fitness training apps that claim will turn me into a “ripped grandpa” while sitting in a chair.
But even this doesn’t address my friend’s willies, which involved (he reckons) real-time processing of his keystrokes as he typed them. What if he mistypes? What if autocorrect changes what he is typing?
I once broadcast an abbreviated message to a dev team over lunch to ask if they wanted anything from the shops, but instead of typing “shopping“, I accidentally typed “shipping”, which autocorrect’s grammar checker decided was poor use of a gerund in its context and magically changed the word to one that it thought I was more likely to have intended: “shitting”.
I am shitting olives atm, I wrote. Want some?
Of course, if there had been ads on the page while I was typing this message, I might have noticed the subtle change from Wallet City to Incontinence World. “Super absorbant… What every ripped grandpa craves!“
And what about the French, who think sticking a “–ing” at the end of any English-sounding word makes it a noun? Well, it might work if the words were spelt right. Try to guess what this small bistrot is selling:
Yup, they serve “snacks”. In French, that’s “snaking”. Perhaps if your idea of a snack is, oh I dunno, let’s say a snake – not impossible in Beijing, I might add (I have personal experience and could have done with that ad for Incontinence World at the time) – then it works just fine. Who knows what ads will get delivered to your organic search results the next time you fancy a “snaking” delivered to your door? Ding-dong! It’s your JustEat delivery, direct and fresh from the reptile house!
Speaking of shopping, I picked up some second-hand CDs the other day and really must search for more albums by these Andean pipe players.
Hmm, I have barely begun typing the name of the group and all the ads on the page have suddenly changed.
And not for the better, I can tell you.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. If readers share this week's column, he anticipates that Google’s crawlers will identify “Mark Zuckerberg’s willies” as a valid keyphrase and enhance Autosave is for Wimps’ SEO rating accordingly. He looks forward to studying the analytics before introducing further search engine chart-toppers such as “Satya Nadella’s sternum”, “Tim Cook’s kneecaps” and “Thomas J Watson’s gonads”.
This might explain that. https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/11/chrome_extension_developer_pressure/
Can I introduce you to "Cookie Auto Delete"?
It doesn't just get rid of the cookies that you thought you didn't agree to, it also erases everything the site put into local storage, the browser cache and all the other ways unscrupulous surveillance economy companies use to track you from site to site.
Every time I visit google sites, they think they have never seen me before. Amazon is another story, but I let them set cookies because their targetting is so utterly fucked up, it gives ma a great laugh every time!