From Awful to Creepy

I started to write this post because of an awful product that I saw in a friend's post on Twitter. 

She said, "Ad in my feed this morning for a steering wheel desk":

I'm sure the claim is that drivers are stopped while using this product, but let's guess what percent of the time that's true?

Anyway, I was thinking about what to write about the stupid thing, so I in one of my many open but under-utilized browser tabs, I typed in the web address shown in the ad. The home page of a kind of generic-looking gewgaw reseller came up. I scrolled around the page for a minute, trying to get some kind of idea about who they are. Nothing. 

I scrolled to the bottom to look at the footer to see if there was an About link or anything like that. There wasn't, but what I did see was a little pop-up that appeared every 10 or 15 seconds, telling me the name and location of someone who had purchased a product on the site.

And what do you know? Every single one of those purchases was the steering wheel desk!

I watched about a dozen of them. No other product was displayed, and none of the purchases were made particularly recently, so clearly it was targeted at me.

I had never typed that product name in a search field. My friend on Twitter had typed those words, but she had not used the name of the company. I did interact with her tweet, however (I commented on it, and liked it so I could find it later). 

So I guess that's all it took: that interaction was passed to the other company when I went directly to their site, even without linking from Twitter.