These algorithms do not work on 'specific people' or 'specific products' they work on vast buckets of A/B tested users with equally vast buckets of products. That's why you will get these 'bugs', which can be fixed by much more specific targeting (soon, on a website near you).

I think retargeting ads can tell that "you're you" and are capable of having implemented such check as a condition for not showing. But I don't know for sure, I only had to deal with them once at my work, when the boss asked me to put some magic hash number in some frontend code.

> soon, on a website near you

Yeah, screw you advertisers. I honestly tried to browse with ads, but I couldn't any longer and finally reinstalled AdBlock a few months ago.

> finally reinstalled AdBlock a few months ago.

Amazing you held out that long. The difference between 'with ads' and 'without ads' is so large I can't understand how people in the tech scene (for who it is trivial to set this up, luckily for the advertising industry not all that trivial for others but getting easier all the time) still browse without some kind of blocking. Besides the security implications of running third party code on just about every website.

Call it well-developed banner blindness. Too well-developed, I'd say, as I caught myself at times (and ended up in an IRC flamewar once because of it) missing pieces of content because they looked too much like ads. It's amazing how your brain can learn to filter out the noise before it reaches conscious level. I also don't care that much about security implications other than malware. All that combined with me a) generally not visiting mainstream sites, and b) being too lazy to install a new extension meant that I managed to run without ad blocker for a few years.

Ultimately it was YouTube ads that play before videos that were the last straw; I sometimes run YT as music source and I got too pissed off about having to listen to 30 seconds of unskippable advertising in order to get to 120 - 240-seconds long video. Mostly it's mood-breaking.