World Wide Web Cookies

I'm more interested in smokestack industries and civil engineering achievements, but computers have become an important industry. I generally ignore that industry because I spent over 40 years working in it, and it is no longer an interesting learning curve for me. And it is not photogenetic. And it is going downhill. (I did some posts about Google's new Sep 2020 version of the blog authoring software over a year ago. It is still horrible compared to the previous version except for the search function.) But I did learn something new this week that is worth noting.

One day I tried updating the maps in my Garmin GPS. It told me that it did not have enough memory for the new maps. I hit that problem a few years ago and discovered that I could increase the memory by sticking a 16GB micro-memory card into it. So I figured no problem, I now have a 32BG card that I can use. Then I learned that after I exited the Garmin Express program on my PC, I could not launch it! (It was originally launched by the setup program.) I tried the icon on my taskbar, the one in the popup side bar on the left and the one on the desktop. None of them worked. I got it going again by uninstalling it and reinstalling it. Then I learned that it thought the 32GB card also could not hold the new maps. So I went to their web site to see what a replacement unit would cost.

But the point of this post is that evening, while I was reading my Facebook timeline, two entries were suggested by Garmin. One was for truckers and the other was for aviators. And the next day I got this suggestion.

From Facebook

So does Garmin's web server talk to Facebook's ad server or are their industry standards for naming cookies so that different companies can share information about a user's web activity?

The next day I got the same video in my Facebook timeline. So I started clicking things. I found an option to stop it. They wanted a reason. When I clicked the option Repetitive, I got another option to stop all ads from Garmin. I quickly clicked that one as well. Hopefully this insight into incestuous information between companies for the sake of advertisements will come to an end.

And Facebook itself has been flaky this week. In addition to their five hour outage, today it fails every time I try to edit a comment to fix a spelling error.