seems like I can't surf the web anymore without an ad for electric bikes appearing in the sidebar. Apparently somebody has decided that the baby boomers are the right demographic for this product.

Has anybody out there bought one? Whether you have or not, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the topic.

From a mountain biking (not road riding) perspective unless one is disabled I’m unalterably opposed to them. We builld and maintain local trails and motorized vehicles are not allowed on them. An e-bike is an electric motorcycle. Other than that I feel pretty good about them

Hi Pat,

I can't help about the bike but if you are using FireFox as your browser then you can press F9 to eliminate those side bars.

PS - At least you are getting ads about bikes. I'm getting about 3 snail mail letters a week about hearing aids!

oh, I get them too.

So far no ads about funeral pre-pay plans though. I'm sure that will change in due time.

You may be one of the few musician boomers who doesn’t need them. I couldn’t mix two tracks w/o mine!

I've never tried one but it looks like fun - if - and I mean a big IF - you have a comfortable seat. I loved riding my bike when I was a kid. Now all I have is an exercise bike that I don't ride.

Retargeting
That is all ..
Somewhere in your browser history someone on that computer expressed interest in the product.
The ads you are served can dang near be used as evidence these days.

As for e-Bikes; never seen an ad nor have interest at this point. Like J&B I still have a mountain bike .. though it's hanging on the garage wall and likely needs air in the tires. But it IS February in MI. Don't see many bikes out of any kind this time of year.

for the longest time all the mountain bike youtube channels I follow have been very negative about e-bikes. But recently I've seen some very positive reviews. There is a young australian who is apparently a world class trail competitor. Recently an amateur on an e-bike beat him. That raised some eyebrows.

on a related note:
Elon Musk has said that we are already getting closer to becoming androids, because we use all manner of technology to enhance our performance. Only the bandwidth of how quickly we can assimilate the data keeps us from being full fledged superhumans. E-bikes are an example of enhanced performance, because they aren't really electric motorcycles, they are pedal assist (the motor only works when you pedal, but it magnifies the force of your pedaling in direct proportion to your effort. If you pedal lightly you get minimal additional torque, if you pedal vigorously, you get a more robust response). A good rider who has maxed out due to physical limitations can go to another level. Interesting thought, and kind of addicting once you experience a boost in performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oQI34zyWfs

It is my understanding that as long as the e-bike is 750w or less, it isn't considered a motorized vehicle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bicycle

local greenways don't allow motorized vehicles, but e-bikes are allowed.


My interest in the product is as a green alternative to using my car for short trips to the market etc. I live at the bottom of a fairly steep hill, and all of the routes out of my neighborhood are uphill. An e-bike would make it very easy for me to leave the car parked for most of my local errands.

yeah, no doubt I gave Google some reason to feed me the ads... although I don't remember googling the topic before I started seeing the ads. I might have watched a youtube video that came up while I was exploring some other bike-related topic.

And if I lived in a colder state, the idea of an expensive toy that can only be used for a few months would not be very appealing.
But the weather in NC is such that I can probably ride my bike 300 days out of 365 in any given year. (as long as I dress appropriately)

We're halfway through February and I've managed to ride every day this month so far.

The neighbors next door have two of them and their performance is fairly impressive, but that ain't exercise in my view.

Me? I regularly ride a cross-country trail cycle. It's a 'p'-bike (pedal power only )

All over the country ebike riders are intentionally breaking course, loop, segement records. Many mountain bikers have trained for years to compete for these records that are tracked and followed by many thousands on Strava and similar apps. Now it’s all down the tubes in many areas due to ebikes. Pedal assist or not they should not be allowed on MTB trails and they are banned on most of the ones we ride. Let them build their own trails like the mountain bike community does and have at it. There. I feel better now.

I need something like that! I have a gas station at my corner that is a good place to just grab a bag of snacks or a carton of Ben & Jerry's or something. Stuff like that. It is 3/10th of a mile from my house. Because it is up a hill, I drive to it. An electrified bike would be great. (Though so would a Vespa or some small scooter like that.) Pat has seen me walk. He knows the story. LOL!!!

Now, all that being said, you won't catch me dead on a Vespa or anything like that. If I get a motorized anything, it will be a Honda 1000 Custom!! Big enough to have some power, NOT big like a Goldwing.

Google knows more about you than you do about yourself.

FACT!!!!


If you type a word into a search engine, or look at something on Amazon, or E-Bay, you will see ads on your time lines for weeks or longer on that item. Some of it is simply demographics. An advertiser buys leads for old musicians... hearing aids.... they know we played loud and have hearing loss.

check out duckduckgo for a search engine. It's private and things don't follow you around. Amazon is still fair game.... so be aware.

What? Would you please type in caps as I can not hear you

Seriously I am very lucky that I do still have my hearing. Wedding bands usually don't play that loud, at least not mine.

<<< Seriously I am very lucky that I do still have my hearing. Wedding bands usually don't play that loud, at least not mine. >>>

I'm not seriously browsing so I'm not playing close attention beginning to end of threads. By the time I got to Mario's post and read the quote above, I interpreted 'wedding bands' as in the ring on his wife's finger rather than a musical band and the thought quickly crossed my mind he would lose much more than his hearing were his wife to see what he just posted....



BTW Mario, your packages from Amazon should have arrived by now so let us in on the mystery you solved.

Charlie, I'm not worried about my wife. She has a great sense of humor. After all she married me!

Damn, both the egg and the chicken came in the same shipment, thus at the same time!

variation on a theme:

solar powered ebike-car (made in Durham NC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_xDuHuk4_E

that was my thinking about why I was seeing the ads without first searching for the product. Google knows enough about me to put me in a specific demographic: a baby boomer who rides bikes. Which is why I thought others here might be getting similar ads. But, maybe not.

I fully support the autonomy of people like you who have built the infrastructure that a certain group wants to use.
I also think that competition should be limited to "apples vs. apples." Enhanced performance vehicles competing against stock vehicles is like Nascar drivers who have illegal devices installed in their cars ... not fair.

A somewhat different discussion is needed when talking about tax payer funded spaces, like parks and greenways. And it seems to be the case that private facilities get to decide what they allow and public facilities tend to go by the 750 watt rule.

But my original intent with the post was just to see if anybody else was seeing the ads.

Most of the ads I get can be linked to a search I’ve done - at least peripherally. Others are products or related products that I’ve recently shopped for. I’m more fascinated by it than troubled. Oddly I don’t get any that seem related to my old fart status. Perhaps my biking, hiking and kayaking has convinced the algorithms that I’m much younger!

I don't see any ads.
Firefox browser with Ad-Block-Plus is my absolute best friend on the entire internet.

Good point. I should probably install an ad blocker... but I have to admit that a lot of ads are more entertaining (to me) than the articles they accompany.

I’ve run the best ad blockers for years. They are very effective against popups not so much for embedded ads, e.g., Facebook, etc.

I have etymotic active ear filters for my ears while gigging. They turn down the volume when we get loud and turn the attenuation off when the volume is low. That way I can hear the customers speak between sets if they are further back in the room.

They use hearing aid batteries. Years ago I searched for some at a better price than at the local retail outlets, and for months I got ads for hearing aids, toilet booster seats, walkers, and items that elderly disabled people use.

So I thought I'd change things and started searching for a new bikini for my wife. That didn't work -- perhaps because I didn't buy one (she would never buy one without trying it on first).

What did work is this:

1) No more chrome browser - Chrome is voluntary spyware - there are other options, Firefox and Opera are the two leading alt-chrome browsers. Opera uses the chrome engine but leaves out the chrome tracking, Firefox uses an entirely different 'engine'

2) No more Google search engine - more voluntary spyware - I use StartPage instead - it uses Google, but going through StartPage strips all the cookies and other identifying info and replaces it with theirs, so google thinks you are StartPage, not yourself

3) I use a VPN on my computer, so my ISP doesn't know where I'm going to sell my personal info to advertisers

4) I browse in the 'private mode' and set my browser to clear cookies when I close the browser

I still get ads, but they are no longer targeted to me, so there is greater variety.

I do understand that the price of having free things means ads, and I nothing against that. I remember in the days when I watched TV there were ads, the radio gets interrupted by ads and so on.

What I do not like is advertisers knowing more about me than the NSA and FBI - or in the case of the batteries, making assumptions about me that are false and then selling that info to other advertisers.

You can't be private on the Internet, but you can minimize what people know about you.

Insights and incites by Notes

AND stayed with you for what, 50 years, despite many opportunities to bail out?

Unless you are looking to buy uranium to build smart bombs, who cares? Do you do anything nefarious that you need to hide? I use Ad Block Plus on Chrome and I never see ads. Also You Tube Blocker so I don't see ads. As far as anybody "knowing" about me, my life is an open book and if they asked, I would tell them!

Those trackers track your IP, not you. They know that xxx.xx.xx.xxx visited their site and when xxx.xx.xx.xxx gets online again they send an ad. VPNs hide your LOCAL IP address, the 192.168.xx.xx or the 10.10.xx.xx but your end connection point, your WAN IP, is going to be the same unless you hard reset your modem. And even then, it will revert to the last known IP unless you stay offline for 24 hours and 1 minute.

Way too much paranoia out there about "privacy". Nobody's life is private.

There is one member here who uses a pseudonym. However, he also has a web page. With minimal internet knowledge and skill in using resources, I can find out anything I want about anybody. I can find their home address, determine what county that address is in, then visit the court system for that county and get their record if they have one. (It is called PUBLIC record for a reason.)

There was a point where people fought for freedom of information, so far that there is a Freedom Of Information Act. Now that information is free, there is a lot of whining about how much information is out there. Pick a team and play for it.

I feel that way too. Ad-Block on my browsers is all I use.

With all the big companies that have your info and the foreign hackers that steal it all, no one can keep their information completely private. "Suck it up buttercup!"

And they don't know YOU. They know that a computer from your WAN IP visited the web looking for a hockey stick for your kid, and every time your IP comes online your cookie says "This is the guy who looked for a hockey stick" and you get sports related ads. Or coffee. Or cars. Or music gear. Nobody knows YOU specifically. IF that truly bothers you, never go online again, because it's here to stay. Everybody who gets zinged and has data stolen had it happen because they allowed something from outside to come into their computer. Whether they knew it or not, something entered the computer.

Remember that no matter what you do, what is visible online is your WAN IP, the one that connects from your ISP out. Nobody here is evil and does anything to draw attention that would lead to the FBI knocking on their door.

Well, maybe RHARV, since it's always his fault....