&gt; <i>Had merely typing seduction into a search engine marked me as a rascal? Or was the formula more sophisticated? Could it be that my online choices in recent weeks—the travel guide to Berlin that I’d perused, the Porsche convertible I’d priced, the old girlfriend to whom I’d sent a virtual birthday card—indicated longings and frustrations that I was too deep in denial to acknowledge?</i><p>While a lot of those examples are true instances of tracking and inference, in some cases I think author is imagining things. People have a scary capability to see patterns and intelligent agents where none exists. It&#x27;s incredibly easy to cause this.<p>I&#x27;m running a simple IRC bot that &quot;pretends to be human&quot; by means of hand-tailored regular expressions matching input and some witty responses. I can&#x27;t count the times I tricked people into believing they were talking to human. It&#x27;s like, write out some simple regexes and you&#x27;re 90% way to passing a Turing test. People prime and then fool themselves.<p>So yeah, I&#x27;m betting those results in the part I quoted were caused just by &quot;seduction techniques&quot; search. And if he <i>clicked</i> on that Ashley Madison banner, he basically sealed his fate.