How Do They Know?

So, this one is a little bit weird.  

As you may know, Spock, I am on YouTube way too much.  When I'm working in the morning, when I'm running at night, when I'm driving to the cabin, when I'm trying to go back to sleep after waking up at seven to confer with ye olde china oracle, when I'm in the storage unit fighting the combined sinister forces of entropy and disorganization.  And part of the reason for that is the algorithm, which pitches me videos that it thinks I might like (also, the damned AutoPlay keeps switching itself on every few weeks, showing me one video after another until I remember to turn it off again).  

And advertisements are like that too--the website and/or phone is tracking my preferences, gauging my interests, scrutinizing my habits, and, in certain cases, seeming to be reading my mind.

Look at these two screen-captures from my phone, from different days, different videos.  See anything in common?

Take, for instance, that I keep seeing this ad, at the bottom of whatever I'm watching.  It's this girl, in a black and white striped shirt, with some kind of harlequin makeup on or something . . . and she's, like, exactly all the things I'm most attracted to.  She couldn't be more up my alley if she had a tattoo of Spider-man right below her bellybutton.*

But it gives me pause.  How do they know?

Look, I understand a phone knowing that I like Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and "Knight Rider," and operas about sinners burning in Hell, and kittens dressed in fighting armor, and bikini pictures of Cloris Leachman.  Who doesn't?  But I'm not even sure this person is a real flesh 'n blood girl, or that the algorithm calculated what I would most quickly notice and/or pay attention to, and were it your phone it would've conjured a very different girl, or boy, or old person, or in Marshal Latham's case, Muppet (he is deeply unwell).

And honestly, it doesn't really matter how they know, in the end.  I noticed it one night, I re-noticed a couple of nights later, and I started doing a screenshot every time after that (the accompanying images represent a week or more).  So, in a way, they totally succeeded.  But me thinking a girl in an ad is attractive is one thing (and blogging about it), but me actually CLICKING ON the ad, which I have not yet done, is very different.  So, they haven't really succeeded, have they?

Yet.

*This is true--I'm not really a tattoo guy.  Sorry.