I'm being stalked!

It wasn't until I started doing things on the internet that I realized just how much of my life is 'out there'. We know that personal privacy seems to be a thing of the past, but to have my recent past flash back at me all day is a bit confronting.

I am very careful about what I put on social media, people, especially some of today's youth are finding that it is coming back to bite them, but in my case I am talking about being stalked on my own computer, regarding my own internet browsing. Its just as well I'm not doing anything secret or underhand, my hubby might see it and have a fit.

I have two examples of being stalked by my own little  laptop.  When I am blogging, I have advertisements from Adsense that pop up. That's fine, I have deliberately arranged for that to happen. But what beats me is that when I have been checking the internet for something, relevant ads are there within an hour or two.

I have been checking places in China. I am hoping to go back for a short visit, to a friends wedding. So I have been checking flights to Hong Kong, and from there I would fly on to another city. Well, in the side bar of my blog there are ads for hotels in China, ads for flights to Hong Kong, and sometimes ads where Google have searched the content of my blog, but got it a bit wrong and stuck in ads that are not quite right. (One example, I was talking about how dry the grass was here, and an ad pops up about buying ready to lay turf.)

Now I'm not sure what in this article will be picked up, but I will be watching with interest.

The other way I am being stalked is with my grocery shopping. Australia has two main grocery supermarkets,  Coles and Woolworths. This is my local supermarket.

It's close by and has everything I need, is part of a local shopping centre and only a couple of minutes drive from where we are house sitting.

Apart from Coles and Woolworths, there are other smaller shops etc, but many of them are also owned by Coles or Woolworths, there is a sort of dual  monopoly.

Yesterday we got an email from Woolworths. There was a recall of some almond nuts, and we had bought some, would we please check the packet and if our packet had certain 'use by' dates on it, would we please return them to the shop.

How on earth did they know we had bought almonds from them? Because we belong to their loyalty program, and swipe our card when we shop. Their computer had kept a record of the fact that we had bought these almonds, (maybe six or eight weeks ago now) and they could put our bag of almonds together with our email address and write to us! Hows that for cyber stalking?

I guess in this case it could be a good thing, in that they were able to contact us directly and maybe stop us eating contaminated food. However, generally, it would have been far too late. Normally those nuts would have been long since chomped and swallowed, so it would be too late. As it was, my bag was not a 'bad' lot and we hadn't opened them.

So for the next few days I am going to look at my blog and see what ads pop up that are related to this content. Why don't you do the same. Leave a comment if you find that I am being 'stalked' today.