behavioral advertising
Digital advertising is creepier than you'd ever expect.
The type of online advertising that targets ads based on your browsing history, purchasing history and anything else that can be scraped, bought or inferred about your demographics, your life and your taste.
"Behavioral advertising, unlike contextual advertising, is about targeting each individual – a demographic of one." -- FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra
Behavioral advertising has become the internet's biggest business model, but it is coming under scrutiny with the growing concern that "free" products aren't really free if they require you to give up a significant amount of your personal data.
Meanwhile, some people are still figuring out how behavioral advertising works.
When Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook is able to sustain a business model in which users do not pay, Zuckerberg replied, "We sell ads, Senator".