Coincidence, Paranoia or is someone reading my emails?

[Sleep404]

Today, I sent my family a short video of my 6mth ds crawling and shortly after I received an email from a high street shoe shop with the subject, "first shoes for your crawling boy".
I have never signed up with this company and ds has only been crawling 2 days, so I'm a bit .

Auntmargaret, I know. In Scotland (where I live) the Registrar (as in electoral roll) knows my name, address, age, and with which adults I share my household. I tick the box that says "don't sell my details" and they don't sell my details.

At no time has the Registrar asked for my email address. There is, therefore, no way that the Registrar could sell my email address.

You may have a different Registrar in mind.

Of course they can locate your mobile phone (if it's switched on), that's a straightforward triangulation exercise. Doesn't mean they can listen to your calls or read your emails.

I feel stalked now

M&S stalked me all over the net for a week with a jacket I would have bought if it hadn't been out of stock!!!

Delete your cookies. No more stalking.

You'll have to log in to MN again, of course.

I recently clicked on a link in S & B asking for opinions on whether a pair of shoes were ugly. Personally I thought they were and now I get them thrust into my face (in a variety of colours) every day. How long do the advert cookies persist for?

"Cookies will only affect the ads you see - they don't make enough information available to third parties for them to send you e-mails, and the cost and time involved in doing so would be prohibitive anyway. This is just a coincidence."

What DoJo said. Cookies aren't half as ominous as people make them out to be.

On topic though, we got (still get) loads of spam via Bounty and Emma's Diary despite telling them not to share our details. Bloody annoying.

Oh yes following S&B links can lead to manner of ads for things I'd look ridiculous in following me about.

The cookies are officially called 'remarketing'

Well I wish they'd check things are in stock before trying to remarket things

Sleep, do you use Gmail?
Their thing (and they were very upfront about it when gmail was launched) is to look for key words in the subject and body of the email to target ads for you.

So if you email someone saying you are looking at going to Greece on holiday, the next time you log into you account, you'll probably see ads on the right hand bar for holiday companies with deals in Greece.

Facebook does similar things with status updates. If you update your status to say you have been for a run, the ads will probably start suggesting running races to go to.
Or if you change your status to 'engaged', you'll get lots of wedding-related ads

Once when I was buying and searching for party items for dd's 4th birthday, I received a Party Pieces catalogue through the door about a month before her birthday telling me "it's that time of year again"! I asked my sister if she'd signed me up or something and she hadn't, so somehow, pippa or carol have been spying on me. I got one last year too. Ver weird.

I saw ads for family law solicitors, when I was already in court. Weird.

Oh I use gmail yes! I must have had something like 'court date' in the title of an email.

Facebook keeps sending me adverts for pre - paid funeral plans and wrinkle cream...! I'm starting to take it personally...!

What service did you upload the video to?

If you're affronted by receiving ads for Tenna ladies or Stannah stairlifts try this to see how old google thinks you are.

gawker.com/5879895/how-old-does-google-think-you-are

I always tick no emails and dont share my details..nearly every company then emails anyway...

I agree with pp. If you use gmail then you get personalised ads about everything. I search for stuff and they come up as ads. I don't send emails much but i'm sure if i did it would.

And thanks for the link Squoosh. I've now opted out of personalised ads