Three fresh Google accounts on different US residential proxies. Two browsed with specific personas (fisherman, fitness). The third did nothing for five days.

Google was more aggressive than I expected. 17 new ad interests from a single session. By Day 1 it was already removing interests and replacing them. Not adding to your profile. Rewriting it. The control didn't move once in five days.

I built a Mac app (MirrorMask) that does this against your real profiles. Happy to answer questions about the experiment or methodology.

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malwrar 20 hours ago | parent [-]

I’d be curious to know where you source your data from! Your project (neat idea btw) has me thinking about tracking this data for my own personal profile over time in some sort of dashboard, to see how Google’s opinion of me changes with my behavior online

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nanobuilds 20 hours ago | parent [-]

The data comes straight from Google's Ad Center (myadcenter.google.com). Google shows you the interest categories and brands they've assigned to your profile. I automated scraping that page daily for each account during the experiment.

MirrorMask actually does exactly what you're describing. It scrapes your Ad Center profile before and after each session and shows you the diff. You can watch interests appear and disappear over time. The dashboard tracks your profile changes across sessions.

	▲	malwrar 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the info! Time to start watching the watchers