Big Brother or just the future of marketing?

The reason you're seeing so many mortgage ads is because the mortgage industry is delivering a staggering number of ads to everyone. So despite the fact that I own my house, just closed on it six months ago, and have no interest in refinancing at a higher rate, I see a boatload of ads for mortgage companies.

What I don't see is ads for books on social media, ads for Cabela's or Dick's Sporting Goods (I've been looking at stuff for a hunting trip), ads for stuff for my kids (I buy a ton of stuff at Amazon, and my receommendations no longer reflect ANY grown up interests), or ads for airlines (I fly on average about once every ten days).

Most ISPs don't do any kind of work with advertisers to make ads meaningful, which is why most have dismal click-through rates and even lower conversion rates. (How many of the mortgage offers have you clicked on?)

In the specific case of NebuAd (the company Charter was using for the program) their technology doesn't actually track where you went, it just tracks what you were interested in.

For instance, my record (which under NebuAd's technology cannot be tracked back through to me as it does not contain personally identifiable information) would show generic topics like "air travel", "toys", "sporting goods", "hunting".  It would not show "dickssportinggoods.com" or "united.com".

What the CT AG did in this case, is what we see too often in government.  They read a news report written by someone who is clearly a better reporter than technologist, got the facts wrong, and spun up a bunch of constituents by portraying a simple technology as a grave threat to mankind.