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Google's Gmail Ads are Relevant to...

Some people are concerned with the privacy implications of Google's Ad-Sense ads showing information related to the e-mail you are viewing in your GMail account. I, personally, don't have a problem with this and I often find the ads and related links useful.
 
However yesterday I saw something startling. As you can see from the picture below, I was reading an e-mail sent to the "Gallery devel list" about a meeting for Google Summer of Code participants (no, I'm not one of the lucky ones). The ads are completely unrelated to the message I was reading but in fact were 100% relevant to searches and research I had been doing the day before (as a hobby, I'm experimenting with the Pic microprocessor).
 
Here is a picture of the e-mail I was reading and the [un]related ads: (click to see full sized)
 
The implications are that either:
  1. These were completely random ads being shown because Google couldn't find anything related to the e-mail, or
  2. Ad-sense remembers what I search for and shows ads that it thinks I may like in times when directly related information is unavailable.
If option #1 were true, then the three ads would not be related to each other. But in this case, all three ads are for microcontrollers. This strongly suggests that Google's Ad-sense program remembers things I am interested in.
 
This has some very scary implications. Be careful what you search for, Ad-sense is profiling you.