Profile Info
Profile Info
[Cueball is sitting at a desk, using a desktop computer. He is filling in a form on a webpage.] First Name: John Last Name: If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith
[Caption below the panel:] How to deal with companies harvesting your profile for marketing

On most websites people are forced to create an account to get proper support, be it technical support or simply ordering products. This usually consists of the user's name, email address, phone number, and also the user's home address if ordering a product that must be shipped by mail. It's not uncommon for the websites/companies to then use that information for presenting new advertisements in the near future, or even sell it to others for their schemes.
In 2013 (publishing of this comic), a recent trend was to allow harvesting of profile pictures and real names, mostly by automated processes with little to no human interaction. The personal information is collected in context with other information, such as the purchase or product review history, and shown to people (typically friends and contacts) who are viewing similar products.
The title text references the fact that most of these companies have an "opt out" option so that your name won't be used, but then emphasizes that YouTube (a subsidiary of Google ) at the time of this comic forced YouTube user accounts to be tied to Google+ . Google+ required the use of the 'first name' and 'last name' convention typical of western cultures, where one cannot 'opt out' (though these requirements did allow for the abbreviation of names). However, this has not stopped people from using names that aren't their own, but using names like "Barack Obama" and "Chuck Norris". Some similar websites allowed the use of aliases in their initial terms of use, but then later changed their TOCs to prohibit use of "false" names. YouTube was one such system; after the merge with Google+ for authentication, both sites automatically linked your false-name account with your real name account, in some cases banning and blocking people with suspected false name accounts.
To try to put a stop to his own information being used, Cueball sets his last name to "If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith", a name which includes a phrase that would negatively affect any marketer's attempts to advertise an online product. [ citation needed ] This name would pass though most harvesting software as-is, and may very well end up being used in such ads, unless some very clever software is able to detect sentences as part of names or similar. In fact much spam is stopped by identifying emails through Honeypot accounts, among other methods.
Hence engineering part of your profile could be a winning strategy to signal to your friends that your information is harvested without your express knowledge.
[Cueball is sitting at a desk, using a desktop computer. He is filling in a form on a webpage.] First Name: John Last Name: If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith
[Caption below the panel:] How to deal with companies harvesting your profile for marketing
