I quietly pointed to this report on behavioral tracking from NeuroLaunch in my link-up to Apple “Clingers,” but it deserves greater visibility.

Behavioral tracking is the practice of collecting and analyzing data about everything you do online, every page you visit, every ad you pause on, every search you type, to build predictive profiles that can be used to target, personalize, and influence your behavior. It’s not a background detail of the modern internet. It is the modern internet’s business model, and it shapes far more of your daily experience than most people ever realize.

For example:

The same systems that keep you scrolling also keep you in an attentive, emotionally activated state, which makes you more responsive to advertising. Behavioral data tells the algorithm not just what to show you, but when your state makes you most likely to act.

Research has shown that digital records of behavior can predict personal characteristics, including political views, sexual orientation, and personality traits, with accuracy that far exceeds what most users would consider possible from their public activity alone. Fewer than 70 Facebook Likes proved sufficient to outperform coworkers in predicting a person’s personality on standard psychological measures. That’s not a hypothetical future capability. That research is over a decade old.

This is one (of many) reasons I rarely engage with Facebook posts (I use it primarily as an outlet to share links to JAG’s Workshop), why I never post to (and rarely read) Instagram, and why my primary social media footprint is on Mastodon, where there is no algorithm trying to force-feed me posts it thinks I will like.