Chapter 5
Self-Relevant
It was autumn 2014, and professional sword-swallower Roderick Russell was, despite the hardiness of his profession, starting to get a bit spooked.1 After logging into Facebook, he would often notice that the adverts in the right-hand side appeared to know rather too much about him, as if his very daily movements were being monitored. For example, despite being a sword swallower, Russell had problems with vitamin pills: they made him gag. One of the Facebook banners, for vitamin pills, read, ‘Does it seem ironic that swallowing swords is easy and then small pills make you gag?’
Russell started to go a bit cuckoo – he feared that his every digital move was being tracked, and he even stopped using his mobile for fear of being ...
Get Hooked now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
