Social Snooping

It's OK - I'm not going to go into another rant about Tottenham's latest managerial appointment, (the worst since, well, the last one).  After all, he, his fucking beard and his boring footballing style will be gone by Christmas (with any luck).  So, back to my preoccupation of the day - is it me, or is social media getting ever creepier?  I know that this, like my Spurs managerial rantings, is a recurrent obsession here, but the other day I made the mistake of checking in on my Facebook account (an increasingly rare occurrence) and was somewhat disturbed by what I found.  Among the various tabs I rarely, if ever, check on the site is that one for Groups, because, well, I'm only a member of two Facebook groups, one of which has been inactive for quite some time.  Despite that, Facebook insists upon sticking suggestions for groups your friends are members of and groups it 'thinks' that you might be interested in.  I don't know why, but I get a perverse pleasure from rejecting as 'Not Relevant' all those 'latest posts from a group one of your friends has joined', (just as I do when I delete all of those 'Friend Suggestions' of people you neither know nor want to know). Equally, dismissing all those suggested groups is fun as they are usually totally irrelevant.  This time, however, I found that Facebook had started recommending groups about railways and railway modelling.

Now, anyone foolish enough to have followed this blog over the years would say, what's wrong with that, as I clearly am interested in model railways?  Well, the problem is that I never share anything about this interest on Facebook.  I mean, never.  I have never posted about the subject there, linked to anything about them or even looked at any groups about them.  So how does Facebook know (or thinks that it knows) that I'm interested in this topic?  Well, the only conclusion I can come to is that they are surreptitiously gathering data about my non-Facebook web browsing: I often look at videos of other people's layouts on YouTube, buy model railway stuff on eBay and follow a couple of model railway forums.  Which is seriously creepy.  It really does make me feel uneasy, as if my privacy has been invaded.  Obviously, I rejected all of the suggestions as 'not relevant' in an attempt to throw the bastards off the scent, but they've continued to push similar stuff.  All pretty disturbing and the sort of thing that tempts me to delete my Facebook account altogether.