Targeted Advertising
 

Hopefully someone out there can lend some insight...
I'm aware that when searching a subject a link to advertisers can lead to targeted ads... what I'm more concerned about is can this type of advertising be targeted simply from e-mail content ? In other words .. am I just being paranoid ?
My wife was recently diagnosed with cancer... I've not researched the condition on-line... never 'googled' the subject yet in the past three weeks since I've e-mailed friends/family of details I've now started getting pop-ups for the Macmillan Cancer institute (or whatever their called)... an amazing coincidence or something more sinister ?

Let me guess... your wife has a gmail account ? In which case, yes, it's a well known fact Google make use of email content for targeted advertising. The official line is that it's all done on an anonymised basis.

Simple fact of the matter is, it costs money to provide free webmail, so they've got to clawback the expense somehow ! (Not saying I condone such activities !)

However, if you've got an email account with your ISP, and something coincidental crops up on Google or other web browsing, then it is more likely to do with the web browsing activities of someone else in your household than with any transfer of email data anywhere (which isn't really a possibility technically).

This could well be gmail behind the curtains anyway - Virgin media (and that includes blueyonder and NTL) certainly is.

SD

It's hotmail.. and I've been on contract away from home since before she was diagnosed so no one else has had access to my account.. I'm beginning to see ow the bad guys get caught !

I'm fairly sure that Hotmail / Bing also scan the mails to develop taregetted asdverts, as do GT/Yahoo.