Lesson 10
Making the Adverts Stop
Trace one person’s unwanted adverts back to the routes they travel by, and match each route to the change that actually reaches it.
Dan and the sofa
In March, Dan spent a week browsing sofas in a free home-ideas app on his phone, then bought one on his laptop from a furniture shop’s website, giving his email address at the checkout. It’s now June, and the sofa follows him everywhere: adverts on the news sites he reads on his laptop, in a puzzle game on his phone and all over his Instagram feed, plus weekly emails from the shop and a paper catalogue from a homeware company he’s never dealt with. Last month, fed up, he bought a VPN and switched it on, on both his laptop and his phone. Nothing changed.
Every route here is one you’ve met. The skill now is matching: which mechanism carries each advert, and which change reaches it.