I would recommend starting with the original source for the story: What Your Electric Car Says About You | Blog To me it seem written in mirth, more in humor than malice. Of course most humor has an sharp edge and a clueless copier can easily "Breitbart" or "FOX-edit" into something else. I found it mostly harmless. Bob Wilson
Article brings this quote to mind. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt. — ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
Near as I can tell, their claim to fame is the ability to 'profile' target groups and predict the type of ads that would lead them to click through to client sites. But it starts with the claims of "A total of 900,000 Prius fans and 183,000 Tesla Model S aficionados met our selection criteria." To get numbers that high would have taken a legitimate survey company a lot of effort. They are part of 'marketing' firms that claim they can improve the quality of ads by doing an analysis of what is found. This in turn leads to a more interesting web site: source web site - has more ads that their clients 'want' to see ad sites - because they get more click-through traffic So this is how they describe their company: Source: Company | Blog Their description reads like a civilian version of what the NSA programs claim to accomplish to identify terrorists. They gather a huge amount of network traffic and craft effective ads tailored to the interests of the 'users' of a targeted site. But it doesn't always work, for example, something I'd noticed and shared in the "PriusChat WebSite Questions" forum: Pretty smiling faces . . . unexpected ad | PriusChat Like the Pink Floyd lyric "Welcome to the Machine," their prospectus reads like "Welcome to the lab my fellow rats." But reading their report, the basis of the original article, it sounds just as effective as the NSA and FBI were when Bevis and Butthead assembled and detonated two pressure cooker bombs in Boston . . . undetected. And next week is the Fort Hood shooter trial who in 2009 killed 14 and wound 26 . . . an officer who was in contact with a subsequent drone target. It doesn't help to read a 'marketing' company claim touting their technology until reading their profile about your pool. Then you realize what a lossy, lousy algorithm . . . or at least as Chuck pointed out, so disconnected from so many of us. Regardless of who makes these claims of ubber knowledge, it isn't clear that we can either do anything about it or that it is really that effective. More useful as filler in a "People" magazine article, ultimately a big yawn. I'll go with a credible survey over this fluff. Bob Wilson
