Right before the holidays, I was spending a lot of time online, trying to cram in last-minute

shopping for my family and occasionally getting distracted by things that I would like to buy

for myself, like fly fishing gear. That's one of my hobbies. But while I was busy comparison

shopping and reading product reviews, companies were tracking all of that searching and pointing and clicking.

So they're looking at sort of how far you're scrolling. They're looking at what time of day you're there. They're thinking about where you are geographically.

That's Haley Sukayama, who advocates for data privacy laws with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group.

All that information comes together into a profile.

And it's kind of interesting if you ever go into your Google ad preferences to see what Google, for example, thinks about you.

I used to be a business and technology reporter, and so I read a lot of business and technology

news. In my case, Google was actually fairly inaccurate because it thought I was an old man

because of the content that I read. I would imagine with fly fishing, you would see a similar thing.

Oh, so Google probably thinks I am an old man.

I am the sort of traditional fly fishing demographic.

It may.

You know, I don't know.

It depends on what else you're looking at.

On the one hand, some of this can seem harmless.

Like, it doesn't matter.

I mean, who really cares if Google

thinks Haley and I are old men? I might even prefer that they get it wrong. But Haley says it's not so

simple. If Google then gives my profile to someone else and looks at, for example, my health

insurance worthiness or my credit worthiness, that, you know, they may draw inferences from that data that is just inaccurate.

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