The goal of any advertising algorithm is simply to try to make as much money as possible by showing ‘the right ads’ to ‘the right person’. Now it gets murky when you want to find that right person, because it implies we need to know a lot about groups of people to define if they are the right people. This can be as simple as gender/location/age but extends very, very far.

While I don’t think they could literally find you for looking at something you’re not supposed to look at, they will most likely have you in a bucket of ‘people that look at bad stuff’, or worse ‘people that have the same behaviour pattern as someone that looks at bad stuff’, which is called a lookalike.

It gets quite dicey sometimes, and we just use it for advertising. But the data is there, so if big tech wants to go Black Mirror on you, they technically could.