Teagan Okutman's Blog

10:00 am: I woke up late as I have the day off, so I went onto Instagram to scroll for a little while as I sat in bed waking up. Instagram has a good bit of my personal information that I’ve shared when I set up my account like my name, birthday, email, and location. I like memes and posts that relate to my interests and hobbies, as well as other videos like cat videos, and this teaches the algorithm what I like and gives it an idea of other content I might like that they can push. I have been looking for a new pair of reading glasses, so I’ve been getting a lot of ads on my feed about fashion glasses as I’ve been looking for a pair that is more unique and fits my style. I clicked on an ad a few days ago and since then every few posts are another eyeglass brand advertisement. Every time I click on an ad, it gives information on what I might be looking for, and it pushes ads at me that might be similar.

12:30 pm: I signed up for a music class at my local community college on their website. This gives information on my interests as well as some of my personal information like my email address, phone number, and name. I’m not sure what information this site collects and stores, but I do know I clicked reject cookies originally when I first went on the website. This info could be used to give me ad recommendations based on my interests such as other music classes or anything related to music that I may need or be interested in. It could also let them know that I’m interested in taking classes and recommend me more classes

1:00 pm: I looked up a specific perfume that I have been wanting to buy and tried to find a store near me that has it in stock. I went on Sephora’s website and put in my location to find the nearest store that had it, and it said the closest one was 45 minutes away. Me looking up this product gives information on my interest in perfume and its brand, and it gives my location as well since I used it to find a store. Later on I did get an ad for the brand of perfume that I was looking for, so somehow Instagram got the information that I was looking for this specific brand

1:15-4:30 pm: While driving to the store I listened to music on Spotify on the way there. I also listened while I was thrifting afterwards through my headphones, and I listened on the way home as well. I listened to my discover weekly playlist and found some new albums to listen to. The discover weekly playlist is a customized playlist that resets every week and recommends you songs based on your listening history and liked artists. I looked into how Spotify’s algorithm works and it apparently builds you a taste profile based on many different factors. This includes recommendations based on your playlists, search history, and what you have saved on your homepage. Information that you share with Spotify is also taken into consideration, such as if you select a certain language, they will recommend you podcasts or music in that language.

7:00pm-10:00pm: I played video games with my friends and talked to them on Discord. We played Overwatch 2 while we had a voice call going and we have our own discord server that we talk in. Discord has some of my personal information like my email, name, and phone number for two factor authentication. They also know what kind of games I play and what music I listen to, as I share that information with the platform to show it on my profile to my friends.

I noticed a lot of my interests and hobbies are used almost immediately to recommend ads to me and a lot of the content I enjoy is because of algorithms that have cherry picked posts and music for me based

One theme I noticed when looking at my day as a whole was that a lot of the advertisements I’m seeing across platforms are handpicked for me through algorithms based on things I have shown interest in or have looked into already. When I started playing Overwatch more I started seeing more memes and content centered around the game, and when I looked into perfume I have been shown a lot more perfume brand advertisements across many platforms and even in my search results. I think in the future I will start to reconsider when I click on an ad, as I’ve found that it makes the buying process a lot more overwhelming. Buying a pair of glasses and then getting flooded with different companies and designs makes it really harder for me the consumer to make a decision on which pair to pick, and it frustrates me when all I see on my feed are 20 different eyeglass adverts. I’ve definitely been trying to buy more things in person to go around this frustration, but sometimes going online is the only option, especially when some things I want are only in stores 45 minutes away. Even then, simply looking up where to find a product can expose my information to data brokers and its almost as if I just clicked on the ad. In the end, I think ill still try to find more things in person to cut back on this influx of products, and to keep some of my information more private from companies that want to prey on my wallet.