CHICAGO

I’VE grown accustomed to reading inaccurate accounts of my day job. I’m in political data.

If I’m not spying on private citizens through the security cam in the parking garage, I’m probably sifting through their garbage for discarded pages from their diaries or deploying billions of spambots to crack into their e-mail. Reading what others muse about my profession is the opposite of my middle-school experience: people with only superficial information about me make a bunch of assumptions to fill in what’s missing and decide that I’m an all-knowing super-genius.

Sadly for me, this is a bunch of malarkey. You may chafe at how much the online world knows about you, but campaigns don’t know anything more about your online behavior than any retailer, news outlet or savvy blogger.

There are two categories of online data: information users provide explicitly, and stuff they communicate implicitly through their behavior. The explicit data includes e-mails and comments that users share directly. The implicit data comes from “click tracking,” which tells a campaign what buttons are getting pressed and how often. Combined, these two categories of data allow a campaign to put together an online experience that will resonate with as many people as possible, but also to customize the experience so that you are more likely to encounter content that’s relevant to you.

At times it might seem like sorcery to the recipient of a targeted e-mail, but it’s just a product of two simple factors: remembering who you are and remembering what you like.