10/08/2026
Written by Dixie Miner McIlwraith:
Twelve or so years ago I was showing my stepdaughter, Susan, around New Orleans. Of course much of our conversation was about family, hers of course, and all my late husband’s children and grandkids. I mentioned how sad I was to have lost touch with most of them when I left Canada.
“If you want to keep up with what they are doing, Dixie, you have to get on Facebook,” she told me. “The kids post everything.”
I knew little about social media. Email was still a joyous leap for me, but I signed up to this new service and sure enough, there were pictures and stories of them all. Nowadays, I understand the young have left Facebook. Instagram is their new billboard of achievements. But I became a huge fan of Facebook. If you are distant from family and friends, if you enjoy reading and sharing ideas and staying in touch with the world, Facebook is a personal playbook.
For those of us who moved away from the USA and now live in Costa Rica, Facebook is the lifeline to all those friends you left behind, to the kids and grandkids and nieces, nephews and siblings you left behind. And without a daily newspaper, network TV, and news magazines, it is the only choice if you want to stay in touch with your past life and the world you left behind.
But Facebook has changed. It’s no surprise that most of my daily feeds are ads. We all know the term “algorithms” and we constantly are receiving ads aimed at the specific interests we’ve shown when we click on a health article, or dress, or titanium pan, or even a cooking show.
Mainly I don’t mind the ads; I have a high tolerance for advertising and often learn stuff. I occasionally even buy an item being sold on Facebook, and 50% of the time it arrives, and 30% of the time I like it. These are risks I am willing to accept if I choose to live 1000 miles away from free, same-day delivery and no customs charges.
Lately however, I am seeing a trend I think may be dangerous. It is certainly annoying. But, because common sense says retail sellers prefer not to annoy their potential customers, I suspect a far less benign and transparent motive than they claim.
The other day I clicked on the “button” that says Learn More for an item called Peech. This is a new app that claims it can convert any book in Amazon’s Kindle into an audiobook.
Amazon has Audible which uses trained readers to record a book you can listen to for a price. There are others, Graphic Novels, which uses an entire cast of readers to present an abridged version of a book, and Chirp, which sometimes is less expensive, other times much more so. I like to listen to audio books. I have wonderful memories of being read to as a child, and I listen to one every night until I fall asleep.
Peech interested me. It claims that if I have the app, I can aim it at any book in my Kindle library, and it will convert that book into an audiobook I can listen to in my choice of narrator’s voices. I had questions but wanted to learn more. So I clicked on the Learn More button.
The first screen wanted my gender. Why, what does my gender have to do with their product? The next asked my age. Then they wanted to know why I liked audio books. Surely the point is, I do. And they wanted to know what kind of books I liked.
They wanted to know if I was an introvert, an extrovert, or both.
At that point I backed out of the questionnaire. I understand they might intend to send me suggestions for further sales, that is par for the course, but this was forcing me into a single category I do not choose to occupy. And it was intrusive.
On each screen there were attractive pictures of smiling individuals that gently led me to click to the next page.
At no point did I see any answer to my basic questions about the product they claim to be selling, ie: How much does it cost? What do you get for the money? Can I really use it on every book in my Kindle? {I have thousands of books in my Kindle library.} Do you pay for each book read, or is it a one time payment, or monthly charge, etc? Are the books all one price or do they charge each book individually?
The questionnaire was annoying and a time waster, but I would write it off to lousy marketing except for one thing.
I had previously clicked on a similar button for Chair Tai Chi. This immediately took me to the same layout and similar questions. Sure, some of the questions asked me about my health, my exercise routines, my attitudes toward exercise. I feel, if I want to buy something, and I am willing to pay for it, that’s all the seller needs to know. If they intend to tailor the product to my needs, that’s fine, but that is secondary to the sale.
And the day after my Peech encounter I looked into another ad. This time it was for a Deep Think product, an app like Tik Tok, but for inquiring minds looking for big ideas, and a learning experience. Well, I will put my inquiring mind up against anyone's, I thought, so I wanted to Learn More.
I got essentially the identical questionnaire as Peech. Same illustrations, same questions. Why do my gender, age and social profile, {introvert, extrovert or both} affect my inquiring mind and critical thinking skills? I didn’t finish this one either.
I have concluded these ads have little to do with the item they claim to be selling. They are all doing market research, finding what box I fit into; the older female who lives alone and likes it, versus the uber social twenty-year-old guy; so they can bombard me with ads for jock straps or p*e proof panties, depending on my algorithm. The similarity of all these questionnaires suggests the answers all go to the same place, some server in some data center, somewhere in the world where someone is making a lot of money with the data. And I have no control over it’s use at all.
Similarly, I see a lot of posts lately that say, “My daughter and son want to give their new daughter an old fashioned name. What was the first name of your grandmother?” Or something similar. Sometimes it's not a grandchild, it’s a puppy. And they want the name of your first grade teacher. Of course these are standard security questions attached to every bank account.
Maybe the answers go to a similar data center, once matched with the identity of your URL.
We live in perilous times.
And we still have WhatsApp. I imagine our Facebook overlords have given up reading our dumb, funny, personal texts on WhatsApp with jokes, plane schedules, complaints, memes, appointments, excuses for breaking appointments, and profane comments re the world today. If they are still hovering over our messages, maybe they will learn we senior introverted ladies who move to foreign shores aren’t as easy to scam as they hoped.
