They Know What You Clicked...

According to a 2017 study by Ghostery, 77 percent of all page loads contain at least one tracker. Be it for statistical or advertising purposes, tracking scripts enable companies to look over our shoulder when we’re surfing the web.

These personalized offers that appear to be following you around are based on a practice called retargeting, i.e. the targeting of consumers based on their previous online activity. Once the consumer looks at a certain product, he or she is "tagged" with a tracking pixel, enabling the advertiser to show targeted display ads to that person on third-party websites. Apart from the obvious lesson not to look for your spouse’s birthday presents on the family computer, this tells us something that we should probably all be aware of when using the internet: we are not alone. (Statista)