"The Spnner": Creepy social engineering, fraud, or prank?

[rslade]

I have just heard about "The Spinner."  It claims to be able to target ads that your wife sees in order to subconciously influence her to initiate sex.  (Presumably with you, but that's just one of the problems I have with this concept.)

First reaction: this is incredibly creepy social engineering, being promoted by incredibly creepy people.  (Although there are, apparently, some secondary ideas for its use, some of which might even be valuable.)

If it works.  (That's the second reaction.)  Now, it probably can work.  After all, Facebook was able to find some very significant ways to manipulate political choices simply by changing the order in which they presented news stories.  But there is nothing to say that the people promoting this ... product? ... service? ... have put in the work, or have access to sufficient data, or have tested that this actually works in the way they claim it does.  It might be a fraud, or they may simply be mistaken, or working on the basis of wishful thinking.

Or it might be a joke, prank, or parody.  I'm having trouble researching anything about it.  There is a thread on Twitter.  I'm not going to "link" the Website, which is thespinner.net, and, for obvious reasons, I would recommend that if you visit it you do it with a "safed" browser. (If you don't know how to safe a browser, I wouldn't visit the site.  Period.)  (If it is a prank, then they caught The Register, which tends to be hard to do.)