1

Is that so scary? People want to be seen as unique individuals so why not personalise your offerings to that oh so unique indiviual? You are judged by sales people/marketeers if you enter a non-virtual store too.

PC vs Mac has something to do with image, Mac users hold hands with Gisele Bündchen. It is not unreasonable to assume that Mac users can spend more.

2

Mac computers may be OK- but the owners are a bit strange.

3

Hey, I run a mac...

4

And who uses travel agencies anyway? Browsing the net, reading up on a destination and getting an idea from other people's comments, is the way I book my holidays.

Edited by: Manosque

5

Isn't that comparable to what Google has been doing for years already? Keeping track of browsing histories and anything else that allows them to display tailor-made advertisements on every user's screen?

6

#4 But what they are doing is influencing what you will see based on personal information about you. Possibly not everybody will come up with the same hits in the same order if using the same search engine. After all, if they want to, they can do similar things. My favorite search engine Alta Vista was taken over and replaced a long time ago and was the only one that I really trusted. Now I avoid using Google because of the first hits are often unrelated advertising, and use Yahoo which also has its problems.

What I really hate is doing a search for a casino hotel in Las Vegas and come up with seven pages of places that will get you a room at that hotel before you come to the hotel's actual website. If you look not too carefully at all of those websites, there aren't actually that many. Many have an identical appearance except for the name meaning that they want to increase their share of business by having a high percentage of the choices be theirs. Of course, some websites let people pay to be near the top of the list and some programmers for choices use tricks to get their websites represented first. It's far from an unbiased search, kind of like many businesses in the USA having multiples of "A" in their name to get the first listing in telephone directories, but there it's easy to see what's been done.

#5. This goes beyond directed advertising, it's directing you to places that you may not want to go to because there is a financial reason for their doing so. When you do a search and now can't trust the answer, it greatly reduces the usefulness of the Internet. I never can understand why somebody would want to participate in Internet gambling. How honest is such a website, they could be programmed to take half of your money (or any other percentage) and can manipulate the results to achieve whatever they want. You expect some competency in what the Internet returns, not to be swindled.

7

Every second article in the Wall Street Journal is scary these days...

8

I heard that in Mac stores they also sell overpriced stuff to Mac users.
They never find out because they lack the skills to compare prices or look at other products.