In last Thursday’s class, I was unable to share with you what Google thinks I am interested in. As we discussed, Google places a tracking cooking on your computer’s browser so that as you use various Google services, data gets aggregated. If you use a different computer, then a different tracking cookie gets generated for that computer and the aggregated data will look different (at least, I think this is true, as Google doesn’t state whether it combines all the tracking cookie data for you across the various machines you use). I’m not sure if the tracking cookie is unique for each browser on your computer, too. So if you use Firefox sometimes on your laptop, then switch to Chrome or Safari at other times, I’m not sure if there are separate tracking cookies collecting separate sets of data about you in each browser.

At any rate, here’s how Google has me pegged according to the activities on my work computer using the Chrome browser:

If you want to see your profile amassed by your activity within Google, here’s how to get there:

1. Go to the “Ads Preferences” page in Google (if you’re not already logged into your Google account, you’ll be asked to as you try to get to this page)
2. On the left side of the “Ads Preferences” page, look for the link for the “Ads on the Web” page and click it. This should show you Google’s demographic profile of you that it uses for serving up ads.