Even a 5 year old know that these companies do this. You do know that people wrote the code to do your searches, determine what type of ads are displayed on your screen, and how to manipulate the searched data.
I worked at a web based company that looked at each of your initial packets of data when you go out to certain websites (financial, online sales) and modified a part of your data to tell the website you were going to if you were a bad person or a good person. (This is very high level. This technology that can dynamically identify new fraud patterns as they emerge). It would be very easy for a developer to place a flag on your data saying you had a certain affiliation based on your prior searches, or you have been flagged by another website that you were a bad person/fraud.
Don’t be naive! This happens all the time. Beware of your page content and you will know what I mean.
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