I assumed that I would devote the entire column tonight to the family reunion that we attended this afternoon. We had a wonderful dinner and chance to reconnect with all of my in laws, for the first time since the man's last vacation almost a year ago. We enjoyed our time with the brothers and sisters, and getting to see them more often is just another benefit we could see if we decide to move back here. Something to keep in mind, as we look at what the next year or two might hold for us.
What I feel like I should write about instead is a growing sense of unease I'm getting with my digital footprint. I understand targeted marketing based on my search history. I don't like it, but I've come to expect it, so I am getting somewhat numb to that. I feel like my electronics are now stepping up their game. I used to make jokes that Google could read my mind. I still wonder just how much of a joke it is, with how many coincidences I find when I look at a lit screen somewhere, like yesterday when I wanted to look for food sources of magnesium, and made it only as far as "food so" before it was the top search result in the predictive text. Now I'm finding reason to suspect that I am being listened to. Yes, I know that sounds paranoid. But this afternoon, as my friend and I discussed our tickets to upcoming performances of Book of Mormon, and I tried to open up YouTube to show our respective husbands what type of show they're in for, the top suggested video was for Mormon.org. Slightly creepy, but I could laugh it off. Later, I tried to search a song that had come up in conversation with the in-laws. The second suggested video for me, after the same one as above, was Eddie Izzard. Sure, someone I have searched on in the past, but not for six months, and I had said his name out loud not five minutes before I opened my tablet. I laughed it off again, but it was harder to shake the feeling of being watched.
Things got really hard to ignore when I scrolled down through search results. I found Iggy Azalea, who I have never looked for, but mentioned by name in a conversation about South Park with the kidsthis evening. Farther down, there was Chris Brown the singer, this after the man and I verbally discussed a story we had started writing together fifteen years ago about someone with that name. The next link, to "The Forest," which I guess was a movie? In the car, my daughter and I discussed the proper name "Forrest," and people named after famous Forrests. As I scrolled through just one page of suggested videos, it was like a recorded history of all of my spoken conversations for the day. I want to believe that it's all really funny, that it is entirely by chance. But I'm carrying around three microphones most of the time, on devices where I'm logged in to one Google service or another. Is it overly paranoid to wonder whether they are already just blatantly listening in? I think I'm going to start taking about really obscure things with unique names, and see what pops up, as an experiment. If this goes beyond coincidence, I'm probably going to agree with the man's reaction when I listed all the suggested links. He said, "time to unplug." I wonder whether we aren't already too late.
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