You know that you will go to hell for working in advertising, right?

Cracked.com just listed: The 5 Creepiest Advertising Techniques of the (Near) Future - bless the little sods for looking over their stats and realizing that the "5-lists" bring them traffic so that they could bring us this.

They freak us with the funny, as when they say:

"Google is already working on customizing its search results based on your personal browsing history, which requires only that it maintains a comprehensive database of every single thing you've ever tried to find on the web.
No big deal, right? After all, it's not like it would be embarrassing for you if all this information ever got out. You know, like when AOL made that information public on millions of its customers.

This reminds little ol' me of when I witnessed one of the fellas from Chaos Computer Club hold a lecture at HIP97. He explained that credit cards will "eventually hold all information about me" -- "and you"- so therefore; "I go out of my way to fuck up the system. I rent those (porn) films in hotel rooms even when I'm not in the hotel room." (laughter from audience) "No, because I don't rent those films!" (loud cackling from the audience)

While the audience acted like Beavis and Butthead, and I was trying to hide as my friends kept pointing at me whenever he said "advertisers" even though - to me anyway - he meant marketers. I am now being creeped out daily by what he said.

Not only was he right, he was so way ahead. I'm oddly grateful that he has given me the incredibly bad habit (from a record-keeping point of view) to buy random shit and return it just to "mess with the data", as he put it.

Or use cash. Cash is good as long as there are no fingerprints.