"Targeted Advertising" is a big deal now that developed nations no longer produce anything and can only offer their hoards of money as attractions for those in the emerging countries with something to sell.

It's quite obvious that any good Ukrainian woman would be most interested in a guy with a good tractor, and might settle for someone with a decent lawnmower. They probably found Bobert
from the mailing list at his lawnmower parts shop, or via a tracking cookie when he visited there.

Now that they have embedded and sold/distributed the information that he's got the right bait, it's likely that the solicitations he sees will follow him everywhere he goes on the web, and sometimes they can be very persistent.

IF WE BELIEVE Bee-dubya-ell that he's never gone looking for bisexual Buna men (???) the connection might be as tenous as his having correspondence with someone who has, and that person's contact list has been lifted. The solicitors would reasonably assume that "friends of" persons with a particular inclination are more likely to have similar interests than random samples. There's little he can do to stop the ads, but he should be cautious about which of his (male?)friends he stands close to for a while, perhaps.

I haven't seen any of the insert ads here for some time, and never intentionally blocked them; but my NIS Suite aggressively blocks anything that resembles a tracking cookie so it may have done it for me.

Some other sites (e.g. MSNBC or Yahoo) that are more aggressively into the targeted ad concept have so much advertising that it's hard to tell which are targeted and which are just looking for any ordinary fish that might bite. I have occasionally seen ads with obvious links to something I've searched for, so I must expect that Google does a lot of data mining and sells the information to the advertisers who want it, and that the information they sell includes a way of identifying the individual computer despite their denials, although it's possible that individual sites I looked at managed to snatch something. I get far fewer of these when I use Norton Safe Search (part of the NIS Suite) although Google offers better search targeting that's often needed to get past the twits, twats, and tweets tripe.

In the absence of excellent ad/traking/cookie blocking, the best single method of minimizing ads of these kinds is just to be very boring.

I'm pretty good at that.

John