I don't know about you but today we seem to be constantly bombarded with intrusive ads from everywhere, my personal bug bear is the retargeting ones, they really piss me off.

To be honest it's these that give oxygen to the fear we have that social networks are 'listening' to what we're saying. 

There are lots of stories about those freaky moments we're convinced 'Social Networks' can hear what we're saying, there seems to be lots of anecdotal evidence but 'Zuck' says definitely not.

Example;

a week ago you were looking at 'nail fungus' treatment, you found something, bought it, had it delivered and started to use it, but the retargeting ad tech guys don't know (or care) that you already made that purchase, they get paid on how many times their platform can show you how far the campaign reached, and all that in anticipation you cave in and buy the product or service, crazy stuff eh!

Is it any wonder that people are turning to 'ad blocking' and ad skipping technology in order to dial down this intrusive, at times freaky use of our privacy, and the recent introduction of the GDPR in Europe whilst having some restraining impact has yet to really show its regulatory teeth. 

Around 10 years ago I was made aware of the growing use of bots for click fraud so it's interesting to see how much of that growth 'might' be attributed to 'non-human' behaviours.

Did you know that circa 51% of all internet traffic is non human - they're bots!

20% of the 51% non-human traffic is' good', the 31% majority of this non-human traffic is potentially malicious.

says research funded by a cyber security firm, so for obvious reasons treat the numbers as directional rather than literal.

When you really take time to understand what this is doing for your vanity metrics it's vital you and your team can identify the bots from humans.

The study is based on data collected from 1,000 websites that utilize Incapsula’s services, and it determined that just 49% of Web traffic is human browsing. 20% is benign non-human search engine traffic, but 31% of all Internet traffic is tied to malicious activities. 19% is from ” ‘spies’ collecting competitive intelligence,” 5% is from automated hacking tools seeking out vulnerabilities, 5% is from scrapers and 2% is from content spammers.

We all know that bots are there to speed up query related interactions, and these are also included in the research, we also know that AI is looking to try and remove us from, well, literally anything, but I thought it also worthwhile remembering that 'humans' are the key USP for any technology to work. 

Which for me reinforces even more the power of human interactions on 'social media', because being social is what makes us human after all.