Opinion: Help, I am being stalked by online retailers who know if I’ve been sleeping – among other things

Have you ever had the experience of buying a present for a loved one at some website you’ve visited just once and then watching that same item pop up as an advertisement every time you pick up your laptop or smartphone? For weeks? Months? Years? Who hasn’t? — Pay online photo created by jannoon028 - www.freepik.com

Do you remember when Christmas shopping involved leaving your house? When you could walk around a downtown department store or perhaps the local mall and nobody kept tabs on you, noticed how often you visited certain outlets, what you looked at or what you didn’t look at? I do. It was glorious.

Why, I could put a shopping list in my pocket and only I, the actual author of said shopping list, knew what was on it. Well, aside from Santa Claus or possibly the Lord Almighty. How cool was that? We called it privacy. What a quaint concept that was. It implied that while I might be well aware that I was in the market for a “Tickle Me Elmo” for one of the kids or a matching plaid scarf and mittens for the spouse or even fuzzy bedroom slippers for my mother-in-law, large anonymous corporations or their agents did not necessarily have to know. It was empowering, this privacy thing and we took it for granted.