Time to start wearing a burqa grocery shopping

I do my best to ignore them, but I really despise the ads that pop up whenever and wherever you are on line.

Oh, I don’t mind if Amazon suggests a book purchase. Sometimes it’s actual useful. But most of it… Just because I searched for something doesn’t mean that my interest has sustained itself beyond the nanosecond where I was curious, and had my curiosity satisfied by finding something about something. Please don’t keep reminding me. And that includes the cylindrical pillow I looked for on Wayfair a few weeks ago. Unless you’re capable of delivering me an orange cylindrical pillow that’s 14” long – and it doesn’t seem to me that even Wayfair, with a stockpile of virtual goodies that seems to stretch to infinity and beyond, can deliver this particular good – stop with the cylindrical pillow popups, why don’t you?

I find myself increasingly refraining from doing an in-the-moment, ad hoc search – especially if it’s a bit walk-on-the-wild-side-y – just so I won’t get inundated with ads.

Fortunately, I’m off of Facebook, which spares me those ad assaults.

But I do order stuff on line with some frequency. And you’d think that, if I ordered a pair of sneakers, surely the Internet – in its infinite wisdom – should be aware that I don’t want to order the exact same thing the day after. Or are they preying on the elderly, hoping that I won’t remember that I ordered aqua and purple sneakers, and go ahead and purchase the same thing 24 hours later? Then when two pairs of them show up on my doorstep, I’ll just figure what the hell. I now have a lifetime supply of aqua and purple sneakers.

I don’t like being spied on, thanks. And I don’t like those spying on me to make suggestions to me based on their mindless, indiscriminate sleuthing.

If I don’t like it online, I’m really not enamored with the idea of it happening IRL when I’m actually in a store.

A few years ago, the big worry was that, when you were walking around checking out the merch, you’d start getting info coming at your via your smartphone. Then there were the talking shelves that were going to figure out who you were because you were carrying a store card that you’d swiped each time you checked out – in hopes of actually achieving the mythic goal of getting a discount – and were going to start whispering sweet buy-me nothings as you strolled by.

Not to mention the spycams on every corner, which are great if you’re trying to catch a thief, but are pretty creepy if you’re not.

Well, things are about to get worse. Much worse.

An article by Hiawatha Bray in The Boston Globe the other day details what’s next up, now that we’ve becoming inured to the idea of someone picking our brains so they can pick our pockets:

…a Chicago company called Cooler Screens figures you won’t mind if they put cameras into the refrigerated display cases in retail stores. The cameras aren’t there to prevent you from stealing soda pop. Instead, they’re part of a facial-profiling system that tries to guess what you’ll buy next, based on how you look.

The doors on a Cooler Screens refrigerator are LCD video screens that display images of the items inside the case, so a customer can see what’s available. The screens also show animated ads, like the ones that pop up on a Web browser. They decide which ads to show by studying video images of the customers. (Source: Boston Globe)

The possibilities Bray outlined in his article were uncanny. Was I among a select group of Globe readers who saw this spot-on scenario in the article, or did every reader see this:

A middle-age woman might see a suggestion that she pick up a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to go with her Diet Coke.

All I can say is that I rarely buy Diet Coke anymore, and it’s Ben & Jerry’s fro-yo. Cherry Garcia, if you must know.

I guess this is just an indication of how paranoid I’ve become that someone could actually get me to believe that The Globe knows it’s online readers so well that we’ll be getting customized add-ish power-of-suggestion embeds in our articles. (Hope I’m not giving them any idea. It’s really just a matter of time…)

Cooler Screens it testing its concept in a number of stores. Fortunately, their Boston outlets are not among the chosen few. Yet.

Me? I’m thinking of getting myself a outfitted with a shopping burqa. And note to self: start wearing sunglasses when I’m pushing my shopping cart around. Hopefully that will stymie the retinal scanning that some marketer would like to do.

Seriously, is there anyplace where our privacy is intact anymore? Guess I’ll have to go ask Alexa…