[HN Gopher] After a week at my mom's house I'm getting ads for h...
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After a week at my mom's house I'm getting ads for her toothpaste
brand
Author : deadcoder0904
Score : 303 points
Date : 2021-05-30 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| sfblah wrote:
| I truly don't get why all technically inclined people don't block
| ads systematically. Ublock origin plus ghostery on computers. Pi
| hole for mobile.
|
| I realize he was at his mom's house, but when he gets home ads
| should be blocked!
|
| These types of stories absolutely bother me, but it's all totally
| abstract because I don't see ads on the internet essentially
| anywhere.
| onion2k wrote:
| Defending yourself against the efforts of Google's best minds
| takes time and energy that could be spent in better ways.
| Admittedly setting up uBlock is trivial, but going further
| takes moderate effort that often isn't worth it, especially
| considering Google have probably worked out how to track you
| anyway.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| I took the time to setup PiHole at the network level, and
| uBlock Origin on my browsers, but to your point, I don't
| waste time trying to block YouTube ads on my
| Chromecast/GoogleTV (which is collecting data on everything I
| watch, not just YouTube, of course). I basically block the
| low-hanging fruit, but still get semi-targeted ads fairly
| often. But not quite to the extent I see described by people
| that put no effort into it, so I do feel like it has some
| affect.
| n00bdude wrote:
| The craziest thing I've ever seen with targeted advertising (on
| iPhone) is when I was vacuuming the room one day & as soon as I
| finished & opened Safari, was seeing ads for Vacuums
|
| I hadn't even ever said the word 'vacuum' - iPhone literally
| seemed to have cued the sound of the machine in the background.
| And mind you it's an iPhone 7 with few apps & not some Pro Max
| future phone ..
|
| From that moment I've been convinced 100% microphones listening,
| cameras probs watching.
| n00bdude wrote:
| Wow -2 downvotes for posting this really wow
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I've had this happen too, but I wonder how much of it is
| confirmation bias. I see ads for random stuff all the time and
| don't even think twice about it, but when we're talking about
| buying a laptop for my sister and I get laptop ads that sticks
| in my memory.
| n00bdude wrote:
| I would say it's possible but at least in this case very
| unlikely.
|
| It's not the first time this has happened but definitely the
| most extreme case where I'd been alone for an extended time
| (during Covid) and the ad was pretty much immediately after
| vacuuming.
|
| Of course no proof but like the saying if it looks like a
| duck and sounds like a duck etc
| aaron-santos wrote:
| Happen to have an Apple Watch? Pure speculation, but I wouldn't
| be surprised if accelerometer data could be used to classify
| common activities.
| n00bdude wrote:
| No Apple Watch. Phone was just sitting in the room charging.
| Finished vacuuming and bam - Dyson Vacuum Ad
| vbsteven wrote:
| A little anecdata: I was halfway reading this comment thread in
| my iOS DuckDuckGo browser when I switched to the YouTube app
| and refreshed a couple times to see what ads I got: some mobile
| games, an online car dealership, a shower head and... a vacuum
| cleaner. Then I came back and read this comment.
|
| I'm not too worried though, probably coincidence. The only
| place I really see ads anymore are on YouTube and most of the
| time they are irrelevant.
| [deleted]
| jarenmf wrote:
| I have a similar experience. I take all the precautions for
| disabling ads. I opted out from all the targeted ads. And still
| when my brother visits me, the ads on YouTube change.
| kzrdude wrote:
| why do you see youtube ads, if you tried disabling ads? Maybe
| try ublock origin, the best ad blocker in terms of respecting
| its users.
| rantwasp wrote:
| youtube is watching you. base on ip and the content consumed
| they guess (and augment that guess with what they know about
| your brother)
| awb wrote:
| Funny sidebar related to a top post yesterday about topical
| engagement on Twitter, the author of the tweet describes his feed
| as follows:
|
| > If you like D&D consider sticking around, my account is 85%
| tabletop RPG development and 15% leftist politics.
|
| Kudos to the author for taking his audience what they should
| expect after following. But isn't this a really narrow audience?
| Why not have 2 accounts: robertgreeveathome and
| robertgreeveatwork so I can pick which content I'm interested in?
| jb1991 wrote:
| Why is it that if I deny Instagram mic access on iOS these
| "coincidences" stop happening? I'm convinced Instagram listens,
| too many experiences to suggest otherwise. I've read all the
| articles and tweets on this subject and yet remain convinced. And
| when I deny mic access, issue goes away.
| lucian1900 wrote:
| They're certainly not above it, but constant recording would
| destroy battery life and get noticed quickly.
| CalChris wrote:
| Correlation is causation.
| Inhibit wrote:
| My wife got a news article pop up because it included a Getty
| licensed stock image that was from a location and time she had
| physically been present at.
|
| The article itself was unappealing in any other way.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I went for a coffee with an old friend. He briefly mentioned he
| got a new puppy in our conversation.
|
| Note, i don't own a dog. I didn't google or search anywhere about
| dogs or made any related purchases.
|
| After i went home i opened facebook... low and behold, i see dog
| toys ads.
|
| This has happened a few times that it became plain creepy. That
| was around 2014, i have since uninstalled facebook and barely
| open the website.
| shawnz wrote:
| How often do you open Facebook and see ads about irrelevant
| trash? Probably most of the time, right? So why is it so
| surprising that occasionally that irrelevant trash might align
| with something that happened in your day?
|
| Another thing to consider: How many times do you hang out with
| a friend and not notice any particular connection in the ads
| you see later? Again I'm guessing that's the case most of the
| time. If they really had such sophisticated matching technology
| then why not do it all the time?
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| That's geolocation. They knew your friend got a dog, they knew
| you were in the same location, now they assume you might be
| interested in dogs too. I still think it's super creepy and
| invasive, but I think most likely they aren't listening to
| microphones.
| criddell wrote:
| > I think most likely they aren't listening to microphones
|
| Do you think that's a line that even Facebook wouldn't cross?
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| Morally? No. But I think they'd fear the legal
| repercussions of high-level company officers making public
| statements that they aren't doing it. I also think one of
| the many privacy researchers doing traffic sniffing
| probably would have picked up on some signature pattern. Is
| it possible I'm wrong? Of course. But if I had to make a
| bet at this moment in time, that's how I'd bet.
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I have a suspicion on how they're doing it. Every time
| this has happened there was a tv around.
|
| 1. Use smart TVs to listen for ad relevant keywords. 2.
| TV manufacturers sell the data to FB. 3. FB gets keywords
| & geolocation data, combines it with it's won data and
| voila. You know these 2 FB users where near this place
| and dog stuff was discussed.
|
| Pretty safe and distanced from a scandal and yet very
| effective.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| or, OR!, more likely he was connected to his friend's wifi
| and it uses IP to group people.
| tzs wrote:
| Or Facebook already knew that he was friends with the person
| who got the new dog, knew that person had a new dog, and
| started showing dog-related ads to _all_ of the people on
| Facebook that they knew were friends with the new dog owner.
| [deleted]
| dotancohen wrote:
| My wife's family is from Romania. A few months ago while eating
| with our children we were discussing flags, and I mentioned that
| Chad's flag is identical to the Romanian flag. The wife's phone,
| with Facebook and Whatsapp and a million junk apps installed was
| nearby.
|
| The very next day I open Youtube and one of the suggested videos
| is an explanation of the Chad and Romanian flags. I had not
| searched for anything relevant, and upon asking the children and
| wife (only people present) if they had mentioned the conversation
| to anybody or looked for something online, they say that they
| hadn't. And I believe them, I'm always presenting to them small
| bits of information about the world even though I know that 99%
| of it gets forgotten immediately.
|
| That was a few months ago.
|
| Lately I have been unable to fall asleep. I refuse to use the
| phone or any electronic devices after 12 (and wear Gunnars after
| the sun goes down) but in any case I lie in bed sometimes until
| the sun rises. I mentioned this to one of my kids (5 years old) a
| few days ago, I don't know whose phones were where. But the very
| next day I get an advertisement for "Medicines for those
| sleepless nights". Now maybe, just maybe, one of the older
| children or the wife used a phone late at night that specific
| night. But it seems far too far fetched to imagine that this
| happened exactly the day after I mentioned that I sometimes don't
| sleep.
|
| I am 100% convinced that our phones are listening for keywords
| and assigning us to categories based on that.
| karaterobot wrote:
| A lot of people here are saying this isn't the case, that
| seeing seemingly targeted ads for things you discussed in the
| presence of a phone is just a coincidence. I've also read a few
| articles about this, and their conclusion is the same, so I
| guess it's common knowledge.
|
| What I always wonder is: why not? We have the technology to
| recognize keywords in speech, the ability to passively identify
| handsets, and we certainly have the technology to target ads to
| people based on keywords. Unless there is no money to be made
| doing it, why the hell wouldn't your phone be overhearing your
| conversations and serving ads to you? Is it that we think
| Google and Apple and Amazon and Facebook and various ad
| platforms respect our privacy too much to do something that
| sinister?
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| Implementation will be hard. Having the mic on all the time
| drains battery. Storing the data offline and uploading
| discreetly when the device is plugged in will be discovered
| quickly. I think on-device voice recognition has come a long
| way nowadays so with more powerful phones, one of the big
| companies might try this soon.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It's exceedingly unlikely to be this kind of conspiracy and
| far more likely someone from the same IP address looked up
| related information.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Siri can't even tell if I'm saying "apartment lights" or
| "Obama lights" when I'm talking directly to it. And if it's
| not even hard enough to transcribe all the ways all the
| people across the globe might pronounce words in all of the
| languages they speak, there's the problem of deriving who
| said it (was it you or was it the TV?) and deriving what was
| the expressed sentiment.
|
| It's so much cheaper and technologically easier to parse your
| browsing history and parsing things you enter in as text than
| it is to parse voice. Especially when you don't own the
| platform your software is running on (what would need to
| happen for Apple to allow Facebook 24/7 access to the iPhone
| microphone)?
|
| Also, Google/Apple/Amazon/Facebook don't have to respect our
| privacy, but they do need to respect privacy laws like the
| GDPR, so they can't actually tap your voice without your
| consent unless they want to risk actual billion dollar fines.
| gruez wrote:
| >I am 100% convinced that our phones are listening for keywords
| and assigning us to categories based on that.
|
| I'm unconvinced. If this is happening to everyone, surely it's
| possible to conduct a randomized controlled trial? Despite
| that, we only have years of anecdotes but zero such trials.
| Moreover, this directly goes against the security models of
| both android and ios, which both require microphone permissions
| for apps to listen in on stuff. ios goes one step further and
| puts a recording indicator when the microphone is in use, so
| it's hard to imagine how these apps are are even listening in
| the first place.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The wife gives everything every permission it wants. She has
| no interest in protecting "privacy", the concept is
| meaningless to her. She wants Facebook and games and icon
| packs. How could installing an icon pack be "dangerous"?!?
| I'm the bad guy for mentioning it.
|
| Her phone is a Samsung A50 probably Android 10 or 11.
|
| > we only have years of anecdotes but zero such trials.
|
| There's some quip about lack of evidence not equating
| evidence of lacking. But more importantly: at some point the
| quantity of individual anecdotes, along with the technical
| ability and interest of the parties involved, become data in
| and of itself.
| gruez wrote:
| >There's some quip about lack of evidence not equating
| evidence of lacking.
|
| It's not, but the burden of proof is still there. It's up
| to the claimant to prove that some activity exists, not for
| it to be assumed to be true and for others to prove it's
| false.
|
| >But more importantly: at some point the quantity of
| individual anecdotes, along with the technical ability and
| interest of the parties involved, become data in and of
| itself.
|
| Ever heard of the saying "the plural of anecdote is not
| data"? I think this applies here. Specifically, I think
| this sort of phenomena is highly susceptible to publication
| bias/p-hacking. ie. you only remember/hear about all the
| instances that confirms this theory, but not all the
| instances where nothing happened. With billions of
| facebook/google users worldwide, and dozens of possible
| "topics" being generated per day, I'd expect millions of
| anecdotes to surface just by random luck alone.
|
| Finally, if we're going by "a lot of anecdotes is proof in
| and of itself", what does this say about other paranormal
| phenomena? eg. ghosts or bigfoot? Those have a lot of
| anecdotes as well.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > It's not, but the burden of proof is still there. It's
| up > to the claimant to prove that some activity
| exists, not for > it to be assumed to be true and
| for others to prove it's false.
|
| Of course, and I claim no proof. But we have no proof of
| gravity either, only very strong suspicion supported by
| loads of experimental data. Leaking a single keyword per
| day or per week would greatly enhance such systems'
| capabilities yet remain very very difficult to detect.
| Perhaps 52 new keywords per year is enough for them.
| gruez wrote:
| >But we have no proof of gravity either, only very strong
| suspicion supported by loads of experimental data.
|
| Isn't that the difference between gravity and "facebook
| is surreptitiously listening to our conversations", that
| the former has loads of high quality evidence backing it
| up and can be trivially demonstrated and the latter
| doesn't? If someone claimed there was an invisible force
| that we don't know about, but you can't demonstrate it
| and the only evidence we have of it is various anecdotes,
| I'd be skeptical as well.
|
| >Leaking a single keyword per day or per week would
| greatly enhance such systems' capabilities yet remain
| very very difficult to detect. Perhaps 52 new keywords
| per year is enough for them.
|
| I suspect you're getting some of the threads mixed up.
| Other commenters have mentioned about this sort of
| activity being detectable via network monitoring, but I
| never made such claim. Instead, I claimed that such
| activity would be detectable by the operating system
| itself, due to the microphone activity indicators. That's
| not something you can sneak one word at a time, because
| you need to be listening all the time to pick up
| keywords.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| I think you're not off the mark a lot.
|
| I do think there's a lot of assumed knowledge gathered from
| your actions... my computers don't have microphones and I keep
| my phone in a box when I sleep (because I am that paranoid),
| but I started getting those when I switched from a day job to a
| night job.... being online on your off hours may class you as
| "having trouble sleeping"
| teachingassist wrote:
| > I mentioned that Chad's flag is identical to the Romanian
| flag.
|
| I find this unconvincing evidence because: you already knew
| this (somehow) and found it an interesting piece of trivia to
| bring up at that time. It's unsurprising, then, that a YouTube
| channel also finds it interesting.
|
| It's very likely that you were influenced to remember this
| piece of trivia because of something you observed, like (for
| example) subconsciously spotting an advert.
|
| These are common advertisements. You only noticed them the next
| day because you talked about them the previous day.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Conversation at the dinner table often leads to loose
| tangents. I'll be unable to convince _you_ that this is a
| subject that had no recent online evidence, but _I'm_
| sufficiently convinced knowing the whole situation and aware
| of what information _is_ shared.
| Kiro wrote:
| As the Twitter thread says this has been debunked many times.
| People have been sniffing traffic for years trying to find
| evidence of this. However, the point of the thread is that they
| don't need to since they have other, possibly more sinister,
| ways to target you.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Other ways of targeting may yield other results, but surely
| there is value in verbal keywords as well.
|
| In fact, not only keywords but even by just knowing verbal
| habits such as phrases used, frequency of curse words,
| accents, etc, could be very valuable in targeted marketing.
| The couple who regularly say phrases such as "please prepare
| the tea, dear" may be better to target different ads to than
| the couple which regularly say "wazzup dog".
| Kiro wrote:
| Yes, but when you can get similar results using completely
| "legal" methods that people, even when confronted with
| straight facts like this, don't seem to care about - why
| would you risk it?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Did the US government use completely "legal" wiretapping
| methods?
|
| And their is nothing illegal about listening for
| keywords, even if the companies currently deny doing so.
| There really is no risk: The people up in arms about
| privacy will remain up in arms, and the 99% who don't
| care will continue not caring.
| setBoolean wrote:
| Wouldn't it be possible that the wife looked up the flag topic
| on Google after the discussion and that it got mixed up as both
| devices shared the same (external) IP during that time? And
| because of that you got this suggestion? Just playing devils
| advocate here.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That is completely possible, and I did ask her. She, and the
| kids, say that they hadn't.
|
| And honestly, I don't think that they had anyway. Maybe one
| of the kids will take an interest in dad's boring facts about
| the world at dinner, but the wife has long since stopped even
| listening!
| shoto_io wrote:
| From the original twitter thread posted here on HN as link for
| discussion:
|
| _> First of all, your social media apps are not listening to
| you. This is a conspiracy theory. It 's been debunked over and
| over again.
|
| But frankly they don't need to because everything else you give
| them unthinkingly is way cheaper and way more powerful._
| fsflover wrote:
| > I am 100% convinced that our phones are listening for
| keywords and assigning us to categories based on that.
|
| If would like to defend yourself, consider Librem 5 or
| Pinephone, which have hardware kill switches for microphone and
| other things.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I mean, I'm pretty sure we know our phones aren't listening. We
| have privacy controls for microphone access and people are
| checking this stuff pretty regularly because they're scared of
| it too.
|
| If that video about flags appeared when you hadn't talked about
| flags would you have thought about it? Probably not. You only
| made a note of it because you'd talked about flags and it
| "confirmed" your suspicions about phones listening to us.
|
| What initially led you to talk about flags? Was flags something
| you'd actually looked at before? Maybe, but again you probably
| never thought anything of it and you probably can't remember
| whether you did or not. But youtube would remember.
|
| Advertisers also use so many different things about you. They
| estimate or know your age, interests, location, eating habits,
| etc.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Without a doubt I have an interest in history and an interest
| in geography, and Youtube knows that. It is the timing and
| the specificity that is so suspect. This video was also not
| from one of the few channels that I watch, though obviously
| it has content of a similar genre.
| g8oz wrote:
| I'm sure that smart TVs in particular are definitely
| listening.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If this was a widespread practice, don't you think we'd have
| found hard evidence by now? That's an awful lot of audio data
| to constantly process or upload, and as locked down as some
| modern devices are, we still have wireshark, iOS jailbreaks,
| and rooted Android phones. And, we have security researchers
| and other curious hacker-types who are constantly probing for
| stuff.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I think that enough anecdotes do add up to data. Hard
| evidence? Until a corporate Snowden comes along we may never
| know, just as we suspected similar things about government
| surveillance but had no hard evidence until Snowden surfaced.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Those anecdotes can also be explained by psychological
| factors.
|
| PRISM was operating at the network level, as opposed to
| widely-available consumer devices. It's the difference
| between tapping a phone line at the call center, and going
| into every individual person's house and planting a bug
| under their counter.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| It should be extremely trivial to show that some data is
| traversing the network you fully control.
|
| While I would understand refusal to do so from non-
| technical crowd (e.g /r/technology or similar cesspolls),
| it's very difficult for me to understand this argument on
| hackernews.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > It should be extremely trivial to show that some data
| is traversing the network you fully control.
|
| I obviously agree with you as the GGP, but the logical
| counterargument would be, these phones upload so much
| data in the normal case that it's hard to know what's
| what. And all of it is encrypted with https, often with
| certificate pinning.
|
| But, well, audio files are really quite large, at least
| in the quantities we're discussing. And so in order for
| the data transfer to go unnoticed, the phone would have
| to be processing it locally, to decide what to upload.
| That would be a lot of work, in terms of cpu usage and
| battery life, and that, again, should have caught some
| researcher's attention.
|
| Suffice to say, while I don't think any of this is
| feasible today, this is why locked-down devices and
| certificate pinning scare me. Audio is expensive, but you
| can learn a lot with a keylogger.
| KMag wrote:
| My wife, I, and some of our friends have also had this sort of
| gut feeling. However, I suspect it's a combination of selective
| memory (how many thousand random things have been thrown at you
| by advertising/YouTube suggestions in the past couple months?)
| and data mining being scarily more effective than we suspect.
|
| Maybe the sorts of things or the pace of your web browsing
| early in the morning indicates grogginess. Maybe the machine
| learning has even picked up on some pattern like insomniacs
| clicking on a higher percentage of war and poverty news stories
| vs. celebrity gossip stories. It's also possible the ML has
| also used your browsing habits to pick up on the cause of your
| insomnia, while you think the advertising is due to your
| speaking about its symptoms.
|
| Also, there's a bandwidth/battery life tradeoff associated with
| 24/7 sophisticated voice conversation tracking. It would
| certainly take a lot of bandwidth to send everything to Google,
| and the amount of processing power to filter for conversations
| about thousands of potential advertising products is
| significantly more than just listening for "Hey Siri". This is
| especially true of the amount of semantic processing to know
| that, unlike 99% of the mentions of "Chad" in English (and
| maybe Romanian) conversation, "Chad" isn't referring to the
| dude down the hall who makes a mean quinoa ceviche. I would
| expect that the kind of sophisticated processing we're talking
| about would kill a phone battery pretty quickly, and offloading
| it to the cloud would cause operators to start complaining
| about the bandwidth usage. Though, I could be wrong.
|
| Edit: so, I think something spooky is going on, but I suspect
| that machine learning is sometimes just spookily accurate. I
| think it's Target that mixes in other coupons with baby product
| coupons when its ML has figured out a woman is 2 months ahead
| of giving birth, to make it seem less spooky.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Yes, the sleeping pills are far easier to find mundane
| explanations for than the Flag video suggestion. Either one
| individually could be a fluke. But together a pattern is
| beginning to emerge.
| crvdgc wrote:
| Some devices have physical kill switches for cameras and mics.
| Whether or not the eavesdropping theory is true, such devices
| can help you deal with your immediate worries.
| beermonster wrote:
| On MacOS there are great tools from objective-see. One of
| them, OverSight, notifies you when your mic or webcam is
| activated.
|
| Failing that some tape works quite nicely!
|
| QubesOS allows you to assign certain devices to Xen VMs ,
| compartmentalising your hardware. No spying if there is
| audio/video device (a Xen hypervisor escape not withstanding)
| available to the guest OS.
|
| I do like devices with physical kill switches. Some USB
| sticks and devices by Purism.
| greatquux wrote:
| I am just amazed people pay attention to the ads. I'm sure this
| is happening to me but my brain has gotten so good at filtering
| them out that I have no idea what they're even trying to sell me!
| tzs wrote:
| There used to be a belief that if you were exposed to am image,
| say someone drinking a prominently labeled Coca-Cola, it would
| make you want a Coke even if the image only flashed by so fast
| that you were not even consciously aware you had seen it such
| as if the image was a single frame inserted in a scene in a
| movie.
|
| This was debunked.
|
| There is, however, something sort of in the same ballpark that
| has been reproduced and does show that your brain does have an
| astounding capacity to at least partially remember images seen
| only briefly.
|
| Take a large collection of images of a variety of ordinary
| things. Pictures of things like a bunch of bananas, a dog
| catching a Frisbee, a cat sunning itself near a window, kids
| waiting for a school bus, a cat pouncing on a mouse, someone
| eating a banana, yadda yadda.
|
| Divide the collection randomly into two equal sets, A and B.
|
| Show test subjects the images from set A serially, letting them
| see each image for a hundred milliseconds or two, with
| occasionally rest breaks if the image set is large (I believe
| this has been with image sets up to 10K in the total
| collection, so it can take quite a while to go through set A).
|
| If you then tested people on how well they could recall these
| images, they would suck at it. Ask them to describe all the dog
| images they saw, for instance, and they will only recall a
| small fraction of them.
|
| Where it gets interesting is if instead the test you do is at a
| later time you randomly pair up each image from set A with an
| image from set B, and serially show the subjects these pairs in
| random order and with the random left/right placement, and ask
| the subjects to identify which of the two images is one they
| have seen before.
|
| People get it right some astoundingly high percentage of the
| time, like 90% after several days. They might not really
| "remember" most of the A set in the sense that they can
| purposefully recall them, but apparently we do automatically
| and effortlessly store something that is good enough to let us
| tell which of two images is the one we've seen before.
|
| I wonder if this effect would apply with ads? You see a banner
| ad in passing for brand X molten boron, not paying attention to
| it. This doesn't make you subconsciously want to go buy the
| product--that was the old debunked subliminal advertising
| theory.
|
| But later, you actually need some molten boron and so head out
| to the store. They have brands X and Y. I wonder if because of
| the banner ad you saw a few days ago, you'd recognize brand X
| as one you have seen before and be more likely to choose it
| over brand Y.
| mattkrause wrote:
| The classic paper on this is Standing's 1973 "Learning 10,000
| pictures."
|
| The title really says it all: subjects shown up to 10,000
| pictures (once, for a five seconds apiece) remembered a
| substantial fraction of them two days later. This is somewhat
| specific to images (and even moreso for "vivid" ones); people
| did worse with dictionary words.
|
| However, one important detail is that subjects were told to
| pay careful attention to the stimuli; they were repeatedly
| reminded that a memory test was coming up.
|
| PDF: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-
| lab/publications/standi... Journal Page: https://www.tandfonl
| ine.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464074730840034...
| Tarsul wrote:
| yeah and then there was this other study where people had
| to count how often people would pass the ball in a video
| and no one noticed that there was a guy in a gorilla custom
| going around, because no one cared about that (they were
| distracted by counting). I think this is similar to how we
| usually try to avoid looking at ads in the internet: it's
| not what we are interested in at that moment!
| https://www.livescience.com/6727-invisible-gorilla-test-
| show...
| Benjamin_Dobell wrote:
| I'm with you, but I'm just _assuming_ we 're a minority.
| Otherwise all those companies paying big bucks for
| "boosted"/"pro" listings are _really_ throwing money down the
| toilet.
|
| Seriously, go visit Stackoverflow Jobs. Start scrolling. It
| takes me so much conscious effort to read those listings with
| the yellow background. I'm specifically _trying_ to read every
| listing and I keep missing them. They just look like rubbish
| ads, so my brain has been trained to ignore them.
|
| It's the same experience with custom adverts on eBay or real
| estate websites. Any non-standard listing, I keep missing and
| have to scroll back through several times to "find" them.
| prepend wrote:
| For me, it's not paying attention to the ads. I never have. I
| haven't clicked on an ad in decades.
|
| My interest is in the manipulation taking place on all the
| people who do click on ads, and the likely negative affect on
| society.
|
| Obviously, enough people click on ads to make it worthwhile for
| the advertisers. And this is despite all the people who think
| ads don't work on them.
| chasebank wrote:
| I'd wager you've clicked hundreds of ads here, just on hacker
| news! You might have not known they were ads but they were
| ads none the less.
| prepend wrote:
| Perhaps, we'll never know as there's lots of types of ads.
|
| I was referring to the ads described in OP's article- ones
| that show up around "real" content.
|
| Of those ads, I've clicked none.
| edejong wrote:
| That's exactly the intention. There should not be a conscious
| connection between the ads and the actions, because it would
| reduce the effectiveness.
|
| Thing is, your brain does all the processing: it reads the
| label, it detects the colors and brands, it associates it with
| previous experiences and reinforces all these connections.
| Then, at the last moment it decides not to engage the
| neocortex, so you're not consciously aware of it.
| brundolf wrote:
| I'll notice the look and feel and signifiers, but I go out of
| my way to avoid noticing the actual company name. After the
| ad is gone I'll sometimes try and recall the brand just to
| make sure that I can't. Usually I can't.
| edejong wrote:
| Doesn't matter at all. If your eye can see it, it goes
| through the object detection process. Attention is not
| necessary. In particular, the brain associates it with all
| adjacent information.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Does it matter though? Your brain will recognize it based
| on the look and the feel, isn't that enough when you're in
| a store?
| rambambram wrote:
| For the scarce Youtube ad I get, I made it a habit to close
| one eye, focus next to the video, not see the ad, and only
| look at the 'skip'-button. What also comes in handy is
| having a hardware volume knob for my speakers; with one
| tactful twist of my fingers I turn the volume to zero. This
| way, I actively prevent ads from entering my brain. See no
| evil, hear no evil.
| maccard wrote:
| I don't pay attention to the ads I see either, but occasionally
| they are a little on the nose and I remember them. It's natural
| that you could recall one or two ads a year that came up at
| "the right time"
| lawn wrote:
| Ads? What ads? I don't watch TV and I have adblock for
| everything.
|
| Last time was probably when I went to cinema, which is well
| over a year ago.
| freeflight wrote:
| The advertising sector has adapted: On Reddit, Twitter and
| plenty of other social media, a whole lot of content is ads
| but veiled as memes.
| titzer wrote:
| A couple months back, I needed to buy car insurance. Literally,
| for six months, I had been being bombarded by Liberty Mutual.
| But I didn't google for car insurance. I the shitstorm that
| would create. Instead, I thought of 3 of the major ones, priced
| them out from their own websites and got the cheapest one. One
| mistake I did make was I went to one of those "compare rates"
| meta-sites, and the bastards wouldn't leave me alone for a few
| weeks. One of the companies I priced asked if I had previously
| had them. I told the truth and a local agent sent me email
| after email until I told them I already had bought a new plan.
|
| It wasn't until some time later when I saw my next Liberty
| Mutual ad that I realized that they had never even crossed my
| mind during this whole process. Ha! I still chuckle. Now I am
| even more conscious to avoid things that I see a ton of ads
| for. I hate ads!
| reedf1 wrote:
| It's amazing how few people believe they are affected by ads.
| You must wonder why it's the most lucrative business in the
| world?
|
| I'm sure I've also read somewhere that those most affected by
| ads are those who believe they are not affected by them.
| [deleted]
| fortran77 wrote:
| Exactly. The people here who believe they're too "smart" to
| be influenced are probably the biggest suckers!
| manmal wrote:
| I'm one of those who claim to not (or seldom) be affected by
| ads, and I'd say my payment history can back that up. I
| usually buy based on other people's experiences, eg by
| scanning 1-star reviews for red flags, or asking people I
| know about their experiences. When it comes to groceries I
| just buy products with certain traits (vegan, low on sugar,
| organic, low waste,...) which usually limits choices to
| products which are not advertised. Same thing with
| organic/sustainable fashion.
| Tarsul wrote:
| doesn't really matter since it's a numbers game: Even if the
| majority would be totally unaffected by ads, that would still
| leave a (significant) minority being affected, so still a
| very interesting business opportunity (which it is, of
| course). Nonetheless, I would count myself as one who is
| rather unaffected by ads, but still ads do give at least a
| presence to products that would otherwise get completely
| unnoticed. And if you don't drink beer and want to buy beer
| for friends who come over what could go wrong with the brands
| that are always on TV?
| akeck wrote:
| A relative got immediately targeted by FB ads for a product we
| had just talked about on speakerphone.
| paulcole wrote:
| What products have they said and then not seen ads for?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It's coincidence mixed with him talking about things that
| interest him, which are of course advertised to him.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| this scenario would fit the parent comment's description:
|
| speaker 1: I just bought a Turbobot 3000, you should get one
| they're great.
|
| Speaker 2 thinks to himself: What the hell is a Turbobot,
| anyway speaker 1 is such a jerk and we have nothing in common
| anything he likes I'm sure to hate. If only he wasn't my
| brother in law.
|
| Speaker 2: Sure thing.
|
| Speaker 2 hangs up phone, goes on facebook, sees ad for
| Turbobot 3000.
|
| on edit: of course I assume speaker 1 is not the parent
| commenter, as speaker 2 no doubt has multiple relatives.
| lawlorino wrote:
| An alternative and much more boring explanation for this and
| others' stories in the replies is confirmation bias.
| callesgg wrote:
| Or mabye he used the Wi-Fi and they detected that his phone was
| loggedin with the same ip. I don't buy that people are being
| corrected on physical location. Some services probably do, but
| the normal ad network's? Nah. where would they get my actual
| location data from.
| pb060 wrote:
| Ok, now I want to know who the hell around me has a bunion.
| Please Social Media Algorithm, if you read this comment and can
| cross my HN account with whathever other information you have, I
| don't need a bunion remedy!
| foreigner wrote:
| This Twitter thread is hilarious. The author decries advertisers
| for evilly collecting all the world's information in order to...
| sell him toothpaste? The cherry on top is at the end when he
| discovers that his tweets have gathered some attention, he uses
| those eyeballs to flog his role-playing game and his brother's
| book.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| A friend received hair loss ads after using wifi at my place -I,
| the one with hair loss, use an ad blocker.
|
| Reddit app shows me ads for US restaurants. I live in Europe.
|
| AdTech is depressingly bad. You tell me the smartest and best
| paid software engineers in the world work on this mess?
| diogenescynic wrote:
| Your friend mentioned the ad to you, so it kinda worked? It did
| find its targeted audience.
| wyager wrote:
| > You tell me the smartest and best paid software engineers in
| the world work on this mess?
|
| I'm pretty sure adtech doesn't pay the best.
| barbarr wrote:
| AdTech just shows ads from the highest bidder. If a bicycle
| advertiser overpaid for ads and decided that they need millions
| of impressions, whereas a highly targeted toothpaste brand
| decided they need 1000 highly targeted impressions, you're
| going to see the bicycle ad first. Most advertisers just spray
| ads at people, so as a user, you end up seeing useless
| untargeted ads more than you see highly targeted ones.
| freeflight wrote:
| Any chance you are browsing with a VPN? If all AdTech was as
| bad as you claim it to be, then Google, and the whole sector,
| wouldn't be as massive as they are today.
|
| Just like with anything: There are implementations that don't
| work at all/are easily fooled, but there are also systems
| running so effective, that you most likely don't even notice
| their "invisible hand" guiding you or at least guiding what you
| see.
| shoto_io wrote:
| I wonder: is this a bad thing? Obviously, the tech wasn't smart
| enough to show him better ads.
|
| It put him into to the same bucket as his mum. And that is
| clearly not very "personalized," not targeted.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| When I moved into a house with someone who has a workshop, I
| started getting a lot of advertisements for tools.
| titzer wrote:
| What this person mentions is really just the tip of the iceberg.
| They link credit cards to phones because GPS coordinates and WiFi
| networks nail down your address, which they cross-reference with
| the billing address of credit cards.
|
| They know who are you sleeping with, or if you aren't sleeping
| with anyone. They know your age and all the insecurities you have
| about your body, not to mention your health problems and every
| embarrassing fact about you. They know where you've been, where
| you're planning on going, and your political preferences. They
| know if you've donated to political parties, attended political
| rallies, if you voted, where, and when. And they know all your
| friends.
|
| And we just let them do this. As tech people, we built this. And
| all the along the way we told ourselves it was fine, because it
| was very lucrative for the entire ad tech/fintech/startup
| ecosystem, and us personally.
| prox wrote:
| From the outset people have enjoyed free services, and free
| means and ment "paid for by advertisers", facilitated by Big
| Tech.
|
| We created an economic system that is at times both parasitic
| and/or symbiotic in nature. We enjoy the free, we enjoy the
| bargain bin prices of Amazon shopping, we enjoy being nurtured
| by marketing moguls who will tell us what will Solve All Our
| Problems.
| onion2k wrote:
| _we enjoy being nurtured by marketing moguls who will tell us
| what will Solve All Our Problems_
|
| I don't think we do enjoy that, at least not once we're
| experienced enough to understand that it's all lies designed
| to sell us stuff rather than actually help at all.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| As someone who never sees ads on my phone or online, here is
| how:
|
| Ad blocker (uBlock Origin) in the browser.
|
| No social media apps on the phone. No other "free" apps on
| the phone. Location services always disabled unless I'm
| actively using Maps navigation. Bluetooth always disabled.
|
| I pay for YouTube Premium to not see ads. If there is another
| app that I find useful, I pay for it to not see ads.
| walrus01 wrote:
| It's kind of cute you think youtube and other google
| services aren't geolocating you (approximately) by the IP
| of the ISP you're on at any given time, and your pattern of
| life analysis using the internet at work vs home vs
| friends' wifi. And when your traffic shows up as coming
| from IP blocks belonging to your LTE mobile phone carrier
| vs a terrestrial ISP.
|
| If they have a data set from a hundred other people whose
| behavior you can't control, using android phones in a
| default configuration, in a residential /24 DHCP IP block
| belonging to some last-mile ISP, where those people _do_
| turn on location and GPS services, and you regularly show
| up with traffic from the same block, you 're being
| correlated with your neighbours.
|
| Additionally lots of other people with fully-default
| android or ios location/advertising permissions are using
| other social media apps from the same netblocks that your
| traffic regularly appears from in a predictable daily
| wake/sleep pattern (facebook, instagram, twitter, reddit,
| tiktok, etc).
| est31 wrote:
| These correlation methods exist, and indeed reveal a lot
| about you, but they have precision limits. In rural
| areas, the ip block might be as large as an entire
| municipality, or even larger. If you turn on location
| services, Google knows which _house_ you are in, and even
| where you are inside that house from the wifi networks
| you give them.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _No_ free apps? What about if you need one for banking or
| health insurance or something else essential?
| Wingy wrote:
| If I understand correctly, these are paid for by you or
| by taxes, not through an app download fee.
| acomjean wrote:
| I think those apps are subsidized by your membership or
| accounts. They aren't services paid for by ads.
|
| But it might be better to use those in browsers with ad-
| blocking, though honestly I'm not sure
| cle wrote:
| That doesn't mean the apps aren't using analytics
| services that feed the data back to ad networks. Not only
| are these data useful for targeting ads to you later,
| they are useful for targeting to other people since they
| can be used to infer characteristics and behavior of
| similar people, which can then be used by advertisers for
| more precise targeting.
| erhk wrote:
| Maybe you should pay for a navigation app too
| rusk wrote:
| They paid for their phone which comes with Navigation as
| a feature. Debatable perhaps.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I'd opt for a clear contractual agreement that could be
| entered and exited, or a paid alternative priced fairly.
|
| Same with the phone, one shouldn't pay for a phone in
| cash (or payment plan) and continue to pay indefinitely
| with personal data. It could be worked out contractually
| that way a person knows what they are buying at time of
| purchase.
| [deleted]
| bradlys wrote:
| You'd think that if they knew so much then they'd know to stop
| serving me ads for services I'll literally never use. I am very
| surprised at how bad the ads I get are and how much they miss
| the mark and are a complete waste of money.
|
| I get that for some people advertisers seem omniscient but man
| do they miss the mark with me. Getting Trump ads (I may as well
| carry a bash the fash bat) and advertisements for services that
| I am completely against. It's like, "how fucking dumb is the
| algorithm? Do they really think I want to work in an Amazon
| warehouse when I make $400K/yr??"
| jjoonathan wrote:
| If an untargeted Trump ad impression costs $.02, targeting is
| worth no more than $.01 to the ad buyer. Meanwhile, the
| information might be worth $.10 to the local DNC or $5 to a
| prospective employer. The information would need to be
| laundered for the latter use case, but that's quite doable
| and economically so.
|
| One use and price point doesn't necessarily preclude the
| other but discriminatory pricing is easy to arbitrage in the
| information market, so in practice it makes sense to ditch
| the low value applications in order to fully extract revenue
| from the high value applications.
|
| I wish bad ad targeting meant that this wasn't happening, but
| wishful thinking doesn't make it so :/
| nraynaud wrote:
| They know everything but they are completely unable to use it
| for advertisement.
|
| The only time I had a relevant ad was retargetting (which is
| also hit or miss since you might have made your purchase).
|
| The only people who know how to use it efficiently are the
| police when they want to arrest people who organize or
| participate in demonstrations.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > They know everything but they are completely unable to
| use it for advertisement.
|
| You're almost right.
|
| The data they collect wasn't ever intended to be used for
| advertising purposes. They do it because they seek to pivot
| from adtech to the much, much more lucrative and entrenched
| govtech in the future.
| cle wrote:
| They don't serve the ad that is most relevant to you, or even
| the ad that you are most likely to click on, they serve the
| ad that advertisers are willing to spend the most on.
| bradlys wrote:
| > they serve the ad that advertisers are willing to spend
| the most on.
|
| I guess my point is - why spend any money on me with these
| specific ads? They're not going to have any positive
| outcome. How many leftists get shown a Trump ad and are
| like, "Hell yeah I'm gonna donate/vote for Trump!" - it
| can't be any amount that makes it worth it...
| [deleted]
| cle wrote:
| I can imagine an endless number of scenarios where the
| person setting up the targeting doesn't particularly care
| about the efficiency. E.g. they were told to spend the
| entire budget, and can only do that with blanket
| targeting, and they'd rather just follow orders than push
| back.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I have the same experience. The only thing Facebook has
| figured out about me is that I like bicycling (because I post
| about nothing but bicycling on Facebook.) Other than that,
| their ads are complete nonsense.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Surprised to see you mention fintech. I think you should leave
| them out of it -- all this dystopian shit is made by the evil
| "don't be evil" people.
|
| It's ironic. When I was 18 and I heard about people doing HFT I
| thought it was unethical, siphoning money from Joe Shmoe to
| evil rich people. The older I get, the more I realize Facebook
| and Google are the truly evil choice -- it's the people in HFT
| that can have a clear conscience.
| sfblah wrote:
| Bingo, and very well put. I have several friends who work at
| Facebook. I won't, and this is why. I honestly think part of
| the reason Facebook pays such a premium for engineers is the
| ick factor.
| DeltaCoast wrote:
| While I agree with you on FB and Google. Fintech isn't just
| trading. Financial data is tracked and sold by these
| financial tech / services companies just like browsing
| activity. Even the "privacy first" companies like Plaid, who
| doesn't sell the data, would have given up their data to Visa
| had the acquisition gone through. All these companies are
| incentivized to track everything they can.
| px43 wrote:
| IMO Google and Facebook have their hands remarkably clean
| relative to the rest of the Adtech industry.
|
| I've heard some crazy shit about how much money comes from
| adtech to fund blackhat data brokers. Adtech buys hacked
| databases on underground markets, but more than that they
| fund supply chain attacks to get highly intrusive adware into
| popular apps. They frequently buy up applications that have a
| wide install base on phones and browser extensions, and then
| on the next update, request maximum privileges and use it to
| loot as much as they can from user systems.
|
| It's a symbiotic relationship. Shady ad networks are often
| used by criminals for narrowly targeted attacks (advertise
| this crafted phishing site to women aged 25-35 in the greater
| Dallas Fort Worth area who are recently married). Those
| criminals use that access to obtain more private data which
| they sell to adtech companies. It's a pretty gross business.
|
| In other news, HFT isn't bad because it's HFT, it's bad
| because order matching services have a bunch of shady,
| undocumented order types that are designed to allow HFT firms
| to specifically extract winnings from retail investors. They
| are absolutely economic parasites, and no one has any
| incentive to stop them.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-
| Revolt/dp/0393...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Pools-Machine-Traders-
| Rigging/dp...
| intricatedetail wrote:
| This is something a modern Hitler would love to have access to.
| You never know who will be in charge tomorrow and whether
| you'll make the list of people to go to camp or get a special
| "vaccine"
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I mean not even the next despot; the people in charge today
| love to have access to this (and they do).
| jka wrote:
| That sounds optimistic, to be honest. I find it difficult
| to trust that strictly only "people in charge" have access
| to the datastores and profiles these various adtech
| companies manage.
|
| Is there already an underground market for person-to-person
| sale of information about individuals for relationship-
| tailoring purposes, or could there be soon? And would those
| become commonplace or even socially accepted if so?
|
| Those are the kinds of question I have about the territory
| we're getting into, and I wonder what the implications
| would be for society.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > And we just let them do this.
|
| And by "we" I hope you mean consumers as much as the people who
| built this. Some may say this is a systemic problem and I don't
| necessarily disagree with that but I think that narrative
| obscures the fact that the average person literally does not
| care. Maybe privacy-conscious tech nerds on the internet care
| but normal people really do not care at all because if they did
| they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or
| Android. The public is well-aware of the lack of privacy of
| these devices yet their behavior does not change.
|
| If you are a tech person who cares about your privacy then buy
| a Linux phone. Apple and google and government are not going to
| change this when there is no significant public will to change
| this.
| titzer wrote:
| > but normal people really do not care at all because if they
| did they would not consent to it when purchasing an iPhone or
| Android.
|
| These platforms literally do everything possible to obscure
| what you are actually agreeing to. Google, for instance, has
| lawyers sign off on privacy design docs that set the verbiage
| on dialogs that users agree to. The lawyers are there to make
| sure it is as vague and as broad possible while being up to a
| hair's breadth of what is legally defensible.
|
| Consumers are deliberately kept in the dark. One might say
| they are naive and trusting. But most would absolutely
| disapprove if they sat at the "God console" and saw other
| people's lives the way the vast towers of computing power and
| machine learning can. It's like a wireframe view of an ant
| farm, but with people.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > But most would absolutely disapprove if they sat at the
| "God console" and saw other people's lives the way the vast
| towers of computing power and machine learning can.
|
| Sure maybe they would disapprove but they would probably
| still use their phones even after being horrified by the
| god console. The fact is that the average person is already
| aware their phone is spying on them without being told by
| the manufacturer yet they still use their phones. On a
| visceral level, the benefit of their phone far outweighs
| abstract privacy concerns.
|
| For example, a troubling amount of people were seriously
| paranoid about 5G somehow causing them harm. What
| percentage of that group do you think will continue to use
| their 5G phone? I would guess upward of 80%
| squarefoot wrote:
| > On a visceral level, the benefit of their phone far
| outweighs abstract privacy concerns.
|
| True. Most have been fed the "if you have nothing to
| hide..." bullshit for too long, so they now think only
| criminals must have something to hide, which is nonsense,
| and paves the way to potentially horrific development if
| taken to the letter.
| titzer wrote:
| > What percentage of that group do you think will
| continue to use their 5G phone? I would guess upward of
| 80%
|
| I know. But people still smoke even after seeing pictures
| of cancer-ridden lungs. We're all little crack addicts.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| > But people still smoke even after seeing pictures of
| cancer-ridden lungs.
|
| Great point all around. Similar to the smoking problem, I
| think if we want behavior around privacy to change it
| will require large amounts of funding and public
| campaigns. I think it's unlikely there will be a
| grassroots effort.
| bemmu wrote:
| I'm sure there's a lot of actual data sharing going on, but I
| also wonder how often these are just the Baader-Meinhof effect
| (noticing recently mentioned things everywhere).
|
| Today I made an insta post about sand that resembled dunes at the
| beach, mentioning a camel in the description. Less than 5 minutes
| later I saw the camel logo at the beach bathroom, on someone's
| discarded cigarettes.
|
| Here it's obvious that there is no connection. But if I had
| instead randomly seen a camel cigarette ad online at that point
| in time, I might have seriously wondered if it's because I
| mentioned it in the post.
| sp332 wrote:
| A friend visited me from Ohio (I live in New Hampshire). After
| hanging out for a few days, I was getting twitter ads for local
| Ohio stuff.
| shawnz wrote:
| A simple experiment is to try thinking of some consumer product
| which you don't normally use and wait until you see an ad for
| that product. Make sure not to pick something you talked about
| recently or something you were reminded of by the media. In my
| experience you will be surprised how quickly you start seeing
| ads for that thing all of a sudden.
| beardedetim wrote:
| I've been waiting for an ad for turtle necks for over a year
| doing this experiment. Maybe that's too specific?
| cvwright wrote:
| Start having conversations about turtlenecks and see how
| long it takes for the ads to show up.
| dorkwood wrote:
| Now that he's written the phrase "turtle neck" online,
| the whole experiment is compromised. Best to start
| thinking of another item altogether.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> I wonder how often these are just the Baader-Meinhof effect.
|
| No. That is, there's Baader-Meinhof effects, misattribution and
| other things going on at the surface level... but the actual
| reality is much worse.
|
| Ad tech is the entirety of FB & Alphabet. Ad tech _is_ their
| business and as an industry it rivals energy, shipping...
| everything but defense. It is the tech industries ' biggest
| achievement, and the most economically significant "big data"
| and machine learning sector. Don't underestimate it.
|
| Tracking and snooping are the single most important element in
| ad tech. Views & user volume is secondary.
| fian wrote:
| There are definitely IP address based tracking going on.
|
| My partners birthday was coming up and I thought she might like
| a weighted blanket as a gift.
|
| Within 10 mins of doing some light searching for prices and
| local outlets on my office computer, she came into my office
| smiling asking if I was planning on buying her one for her
| birthday.
|
| She had suddenly seen multiple ads for weighted blankets appear
| on Facebook.
|
| This was the most obvious example, but there have been many
| others were one of us researching something through our home
| internet connection will affect the advertising the other
| person sees.
|
| I now have to be more careful in how I do my gift searching.
| Personally, I'm not really seeing this type of targeted
| advertising as a net positive.
| strangattractor wrote:
| I constantly get ads for things I just purchased. Note to Self:
| Need to figure out how I can get paid to sell useless advertising
| to marketing chumps:)
| spinach wrote:
| Companies make billions off _free_ products. It shouldn 't be
| surprising to anyone there are extremely shady things going on.
|
| Don't use a phone and pay in cash.
| melomal wrote:
| I have an amazing story.
|
| Moved into a new place, in Poland. Bought a new smart TV, it was
| a Samsung (kaput after 2 years). Me and my wife decided to have
| an impromptu singing session just bellowing out 'Hotel, Hotel,
| Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel' in a Pitbull (Cuban rapper) style
| whilst looking for holidays to book.
|
| Within the next 5 minutes, Trivago was on the TV. Now bear in
| mind I have literally never seen Trivago being advertising on the
| TV and all of a sudden their catchphrase at the end of the ad got
| me 'Hotel, Trivago'.
|
| Safe to say me and wife had a few minutes of WTF just staring at
| the screen then each other. That's when I truly became convinced
| that everything is listening. Could have been a coincidence
| though but it was an almighty coincidence to say the least.
| afterburner wrote:
| > whilst looking for holidays to book
|
| Cookies, IP addresses
|
| Also, maybe not in this case but more generally, GPS
| bby wrote:
| Subtle flex. He has a wife.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Sounds like coincidence mixed with confirmation bias. The
| likelier explanation for stories like this.
| melomal wrote:
| I do lean more towards coincidence but since then there's
| been no Trivago ads.
|
| To be honest, the ads on TV are basically on repeat so this
| is why it stood out so much, the fact that I can practically
| give you the schedule of ads that I am about to be shown
| during a break which does not include Trivago is what gets
| me.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| >looking for holidays to book
|
| Well, I assume you weren't looking through an offline printed
| holiday guide of some sort :-)
| jacob019 wrote:
| This. We always get targeted youtube ads after googling
| things. Creepy AF.
| gruez wrote:
| Google and youtube are the same company, so it's not
| exactly surprising that they'd share data. As for whether
| it's creepy, I'd say it isn't because you explicitly gave
| up that data. This is slightly different than something
| like google/facebook tracking you via third party cookies,
| because that involves no consent at all.
| Ccecil wrote:
| Are they listening to mics? That is constantly debated/debunked.
|
| But yes...geolocation, networks you log to, phones you are near,
| what you search. That all seems to play a part.
|
| Linkedin has in the past for me suggested connections based on
| the wifi I was using. Someone who I don't have common friends or
| career as and I was getting their contacts as suggestions just
| after using the same wifi. I have no facebook account...but it
| seems every phone I buy has it preinstalled.
|
| To me I have long assumed this was going on. With the number of
| sensors and the capability to have a near constant data
| connection it boils down to "if they can...they will". But as a
| good friend of mine says "I thought this was what we wanted".
| People seem to enjoy that the first button they see when they log
| in is the button they were actually looking for. (not saying
| everyone...some take security/privacy very serious...but the
| flame is bright for the masses).
|
| I constantly have ads served to me for something that has been
| discussed in the room near me...or topics I would never have an
| interest in but the conversation was happening near me. My
| assumption is someone I was near enough for my phone to "see"
| their MAC address (if via common wifi or if it is adhoc...doesn't
| matter) and they searched the terms later.
|
| I have become so used to this it has stopped bothering me. The
| real concerns I have are when I start getting served ads for
| things like Cancer or other medical treatments. It makes me say
| in my head "Does the bot know something I don't? Is there some
| sort of symptom I am having and the AI has picked up on it before
| me?"
|
| At any rate...welcome to the future. Accept that tracking is a
| thing. I don't personally see a way to force the companies who
| have already become some of the biggest in the world by
| storing/selling data that they need to stop. Even through
| regulation. My personal opinion is we have passed the point of no
| return...it is the new normal until "the great reset" which will
| take a near extinction level event to force us back.
| beermonster wrote:
| > Are they listening to mics? That is constantly
| debated/debunked.
|
| No. They don't need to. Also, in iOS at least, they'd get
| caught as there are visual indicators now for when mic/camera
| are activated.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| This should be illegal. Why politicians don't stop this?
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Haven't studies found this kind of thing to be mostly the
| frequency illusion?
| [deleted]
| decafninja wrote:
| Weirdest anecdote for me: My wife and I were peeling shrimp for
| dinner and we were chatting how great it would be if there was
| some kind of tool that would make the task easier.
|
| A while later after we ate, I was browsing Facebook and I was
| being shown ads for shrimp peeling tools. We had not done any
| kind of online search, etc. for it. We don't even have any "voice
| assistants" like Alexa, Google Voice, etc. (Though we both have
| iPhones so we have Siri).
|
| So how did FB know we had been talking about shrimp peelers?
| cmg wrote:
| Had you or your wife looked up "shrimp recipes" or "how to make
| shrimp" or anything like that in preparation for the meal? Or
| did you use a loyalty/discount card at the supermarket that's
| tied to your identity?
| rsync wrote:
| "When I use my discount card at the grocery store? Every
| purchase? That's a dataset for sale."
|
| He's just using that as a general example, right ? He does not,
| himself, as a data privacy expert and knowledgeable user of
| networks _actually use a grocery discount card_ , right ?
|
| Further, the more general set of examples that make up his
| narrative rely, to some degree, on using a mobile device that is
| connected to, or even registered in, his actual, real name.
|
| He doesn't do that, right ? Is anyone here doing that ?
| katmannthree wrote:
| Yes? I don't particularly care whether or not the grocery store
| knows exactly which products I buy, especially since it's moot
| with 1) the introduction of eye-level facial recognition
| cameras at every checkout lane and 2) paying with a card
| because I don't want to carry cash.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| the_biot wrote:
| Considering he doesn't use ad blockers, i.e. he sees ads at
| all, he may not be a data privacy expert. /s
| erhk wrote:
| Government bodies have forms that require you submit a phone
| number. You cannot go to a restaurant without using a QR code
| reader to see the menu. I'm not sure what reality you live in
| but having no phone is akin to living off grid now
| rsync wrote:
| I have a phone just like you do.
|
| It's just not attached to any human identity.
| gnicholas wrote:
| A couple weeks ago there was an HN post about some lockpicking
| tool. I watched a video about it in Firefox Focus on my iPhone.
| Later that day, I was on YouTube on Safari, logged into my gmail
| account. It recommended videos on lockpicking.
|
| I assume this is based on IP address? What can be done about
| this? If Firefox Focus/incognito isn't enough, what should I be
| doing? I already use NextDNS and mostly use Brave incognito on my
| laptop.
| jesseryoung wrote:
| I've got a question for anybody who works in ad/marketing tech -
| is what Robert is describing something that you've worked on/with
| and seen successful results? If so did you build it that way
| intentionally? Like, I totally understand that it's possible, but
| has anybody intentionally built something that tracks or
| correlates peoples location so they can group them with similar
| interests and sell them similar products?
|
| To me, the stupidest simplest solution is probably the most
| likely - some naive marketing analyst probably just grouped all
| traffic coming from the same IP address into the same bucket and
| blasted ads to them based on recent Amazon purchases at the same
| IP address.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Yes. Many times, and at scale.
|
| While not strictly accurate, it's easiest to think about it as
| a simple machine learning system. The system can't be
| interrogated, so you don't really know what correlations are
| being made.
|
| The actual way it works is in layers. There's a human layer,
| using logic to create segments or other targeting methods.
| There's the ad network's automated optimisation options. FB
| really took this to the next level. There's retargeting.
| Bidding, and the economics of advertising plays a big role in
| giving the system intelligence. 3rd party ad management
| software.
|
| Each piece/layer typically ads additional data to the set. The
| human/advertiser generally does this this by uploading or
| tagging their own customers. FB, for example, will allow you to
| create a "similar" list, where it finds user similar to those
| you designate. Similarity is somewhat ambiguous. FB/Adwords is
| where the heavy lifting happens, most commonly via bid
| optimisation.
|
| The only intention is "goals per $." Price, and volume. As I
| said, the sausage factor is complex and no one sees the whole
| thing. In practical terms, a massive NN optimizing for
| sales/signups/etc itself is a decent analogy... and
| increasingly not an analogy.
| cordite wrote:
| How is this going to work with carrier grade NAT?
|
| Edit: commercial to carrier, thanks justusthane
| kube-system wrote:
| There are other identifiers that can work cross-device
| other than IP. Basically anything tied to you (identifying
| or not) that exists on both devices can be used.
|
| Have you logged into a service or websites on multiple
| devices before? Then you voluntarily gave them enough data
| to link it.
| justusthane wrote:
| Just FYI, it's " _carrier_ -grade NAT". And there are a lot
| of ways to associate people with each other other than
| their public IP address. The linked twitter thread doesn't
| even mention IP addresses, neither does the comment you
| responded to. I suspect IP addresses are already a pretty
| inaccurate way to link people with each other.
| beagle3 wrote:
| It likely doesn't for IPv4 now that everyone has switched
| to HTTPS.
|
| Many ISPs used to insert "client id" and other uniquely
| identifying information while NATting/proxying. Luckily,
| they can't do that for https - but I wouldn't put it beyond
| them to sell a back channel "connection xyz is unique user
| abc" service.
|
| However, with the move to IPv6 , at least in my area, NAT
| is gone and static assignment is in. You just need to know
| the isp's prefix length, and you get a unique identifier.
| mrb wrote:
| Heuristics. Marketers do cross-device correlation only when
| seeing a small number of devices (ie. look like they could
| be part of the same household). If they see hundreds of
| devices behind the same IP it's probably a larger entity
| (ie. a company office).
| [deleted]
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I think the question isn't so much how it works with that
| (as in you are pointing towards it just not working) and
| instead just how well it works with that.
|
| Do you have numbers on how many consumers in say NA,
| various European countries etc are behind CGNs? I would
| guess most are used by mobile carriers (but I have no data)
| and I would gather that this particular technology is not
| going to be used to try and associate random mobile users
| anyway. It's more about who likely lives in the same
| household.
| ipython wrote:
| Google has that covered since many of those behind CGN
| are also on networks with native ipv6. Many mobile
| networks have already made the switch - dual stack to the
| handset with native ipv6 and ipv4 handled via CGN.
|
| Googles interest in ipv6 isn't entirely altruistic after
| all...
| jesseryoung wrote:
| Fascinating. Any clue as to what the largest factor for
| "similarity" is, and how much it contributes?
| dalbasal wrote:
| These tweets are a pretty decent sample, though I suspect
| these factors (association with other phones/users and
| such) are more active in bid optimisation than list
| generation. Hands off stuff is gradually overtaking the
| "hand coded" elements. These, I imagine, can take advantage
| of wider set of heuristics.
|
| List generation is dumber, and feels more hand coded. Basic
| demographics, facebook/instagram interests.
| Eridrus wrote:
| > To me, the stupidest simplest solution is probably the most
| likely - some naive marketing analyst probably just grouped all
| traffic coming from the same IP address into the same bucket
| and blasted ads to them based on recent Amazon purchases at the
| same IP address.
|
| Yes, the dirty secret of basically all discussions about
| tracking on the internet is that IP+User-Agent is a pretty good
| baseline that is commonly used.
| hagy wrote:
| Yep, this is called cross-device matching. Generally consists
| of some modeling for devices seen together on the same IP
| address. One of the notable AdTech companies in cross-device
| modeling is Drawbridge (purchased by LinkedIn).
|
| Here's a 2015 Kaggle competition that they hosted, which
| provides sample data that they use in modeling,
| https://www.kaggle.com/c/icdm-2015-drawbridge-cross-device-c...
|
| And here's a technical writeup of one of the well-performing
| solutions from that competition,
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.01175.pdf
| secondcoming wrote:
| Tapad are probably bigger than Drawbridge
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Ultimately, all attempts at attribution are heuristic in
| nature. Marketers know a single IP doesn't represent a single
| person, but if it's the best they can do, it's the best they
| can do. Even for services with accounts, tracking can't be
| perfect. When my wife's phone or laptop is closer than mine and
| she's logged into Amazon Prime or Uber Eats, I'm ordering
| through her account. Now she's gonna see ads for gym equipment
| she has no interest in. Oh well. It doesn't matter how good
| your location, device, browser fingerprinting is when people
| share locations, devices, and browsers. The only way to know
| it's really me is to get my actual fingerprint or some other
| _truly_ unique biometric identifier.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| It's a little different. Targeting these days is more and more
| machine learning driven. So it's not really someone sitting
| down and saying "show an ad to anyone who stayed at a house
| with someone who bought this toothpaste". Rather, a bunch of
| data flows into Facebook and it uses those signals to decide
| who should see what. It's not a naive analyst. It's a
| statistical engine (and yes, that engine can sometimes be
| naive, and it's working off of really noisy data).
|
| For example, any good Facebook marketer probably uses
| "lookalike audiences". You upload some existing customers and
| then tell Facebook to show ads to people who are "like" your
| customers. Facebook then used whatever data it has to find
| similar users (demographic, interest, geographic, behavior
| etc).
|
| In fact, lookalikes can be so good that any good marketer also
| knows to _exclude_ existing customers from the lookalike
| audience (unless you're actually retargeting your existing
| customers).
| klyrs wrote:
| It works, and it's awful. I was looking for a present for my
| girlfriend, and she started seeing ads for the things I was
| looking at. About a week later, she was excited to show me her
| new purchase... and I'm scrambling to find a new gift idea. And
| now I'm paranoid -- it seems that the only way to stop this is
| to make a cash purchase in meatspace.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| You should suggest her to install uBlock Origin. Not just for
| that problem, in general it's good practice.
| klyrs wrote:
| She's the IT expert of the house. I don't tell her what to
| install, or how to manage our network. If anything, I
| should put a pihole on my wishlist -- but even that
| wouldn't solve the problem that all of our metadata is
| correlated, and nothing blocks first-party tracking
| krn wrote:
| > but even that wouldn't solve the problem that all of
| our metadata is correlated, and nothing blocks first-
| party tracking
|
| That's true - nothing stops Google from knowing what you
| were looking for - but if your girlfriend was seeing ads,
| she wasn't using uBlock: because it blocks all first-
| party ads, too.
|
| I think a much bigger problem here is that almost nobody
| uses Firefox for Mobile. Also, uBlock doesn't block ads
| across native apps (for instance, YouTube).
|
| The solution is to use something like NextDNS as your DNS
| provider at OS or router level. At least on Android 9+
| and most latest Linux distributions (via systemd-
| resolved) no additional software is required for it to
| work.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| How does purchasing in a physical store prevents them from
| using your tracked online activities to target you and others
| ?
| klyrs wrote:
| It doesn't, as you ask, prevent tracking of my online
| behavior. That's a lost cause. Cash allows me to hide
| select purchases, as long as I don't do any comparison
| shopping online. And that prevents disclosure of gift
| purchases to my housemates.
| bashinator wrote:
| Yet another reason why ad blocking is ethical.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Reminds me when I was getting relentlessly retargeted ads to
| purchase something. So when I did, I paid cash to keep the
| ads coming and mitigate any attempts at offline attribution.
|
| I'm guessing the present wasn't a PiHole or VPN?
| beagle3 wrote:
| Use Firefox and install uBlock Origin.
|
| Your credit card company will still sell you out - but that
| does take a little more time, and will only include one item
| (rather than your entire browsing history) - meatspace cash
| is likely to help with that, but that's much less of a
| problem in your context, I think.
| hinkley wrote:
| That won't help with IP tracking. Buying presents from work
| sounds like a better option. Assuming we ever go back to
| work.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Ublock presumably will block the tracking code, if it's a
| third-party tracker.
| klyrs wrote:
| Don't forget, a VPN, a new email account and a new phone
| number for "2fa". Also, where is it getting shipped? I
| can't receive packages at work. The "convenience" of
| shopping online is a legend from my youth
| pen2l wrote:
| I use uBlock Origin and have an iphone. Unfortunately
| getting an adblocker is not as trivial, so inertia took
| over and I see ads on youtube app and I see ads when
| generally browsing the web on the iphone.
|
| I notice that over the course of the last year either some
| really sophisticated newer algos are being put to use, or
| the collaboration and sharing of information between ad
| networks has been streamlined or increased in some manner
| because I'm being served ads that are creepily relevant.
| But in any case, the clues and data you leave behind,
| they're aplenty and quite suspect to being compromised and
| pounced on by ad networks. I think at this point if you
| wanna play tango, don't only just play defense (ad block),
| go on the offense as well and use adnauseam to pollute the
| profiles they've built of you.
|
| I want to articulate as well the annoyance I feel when
| being served targeted ads: an ad, if it's related to my
| interests, even tangentially, it does grab me, and no doubt
| it probably compels me to make some decision one way or the
| other. Particularly, what gets me, I believe, is both the
| mental overload of being served ads of "relevant" things
| which will attract my attention too much and clutter my
| mind and distract me, and the sheer arrogance of pushing
| things it believes are relevant to my interests.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Magic Lasso works well on iPhone/iPad, and so does
| Firefox Focus ; I have both installed, not sure how they
| divide the work, but I hardly ever see an ad in Safari or
| Firefox on iOS.
|
| (They don't stop YouTube from showing ads)
| robotmay wrote:
| Adguard on iPhone works alright, hooks into the Safari
| blocker API. It's not as effective as a proper blocker on
| Android but it does improve the experience.
|
| I also run my iOS devices over Wireguard when out and
| about to my home network which runs a pihole DNS server.
| Works surprisingly well and also catches ads in apps that
| way.
| erhk wrote:
| I took a picture of a friend's headphones on Snapchat
| that they had left in my car. In the next week I started
| seeing ads for that exact model, and they were distinctly
| identical. Not a fun user experience.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| > have an iphone.
|
| Well. I would postulate, that targeting iphone users
| would be numero uno priority at any self-respecting
| adtech company, since its a strong signal that marketing
| does in fact appeal to you more strongly and you likely
| have a lot of "spare change"...
| shinycode wrote:
| I have an iPhone with AdBlock Pro and I use NextDNS on
| all my devices. I almost never have any ad with NextDNS
| (paid version) so for me it works really well.
|
| Sometimes it's << annoying >> because I click on links
| from articles and emails and they are blocked so I can
| choose to give up or disable NextDNS for this time but
| it's my choice to be tracked
| martinmunk wrote:
| I guess what really baffles me here is that a CC issuer is
| allowed to sell that data at all. Just. Wow.
|
| I'm not trying to show off my European high horse, it's not
| like we don't have our own problems.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Will Firefox and uBlock Origin prevent my IP address from
| being discovered? Sibling posts indicate this was probably
| accomplished via IP address targeting.
| beagle3 wrote:
| It will block all the 3rd parties that have to do
| anything with retargeting like Facebook, google, Adnexus,
| etc.
|
| It's unusual for sites to conspire directly and share
| data about IP (but that may change)
| yborg wrote:
| And by meatspace cash, it has to be pieces of paper and
| metal. If you use a debit card, the payment network knows
| anyway. And that might not even be good enough, if you
| carry your phone, they have your location at that time, so
| if someone really wanted to, it's probably not even hard to
| correlate the relatively rare cash purchase at that exact
| time and place and know it was you anyway.
| smsm42 wrote:
| You could just buy a generic giftcard (like Amex one) and
| use it to make the actual purchase.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Let me tell you this: I'm from the Flemish part of Belgium.
| YouTube and other sites with ads can't figure out that I don't
| speak French.
|
| So even with this simplest of use-cases: GPS says I live in
| Flemish part, never search in French, etc. Still they sometimes
| show me French ads, which is a total waste of course.
|
| So I don't believe the tech is so crazy advanced already.
| brnt wrote:
| There are a surprising amount of people that think Belgium is
| majority French speaking. While I understand Belgium is
| tipping few foreign curricula with such trivia, I blame it
| for this default across the many services that do it wrong.
| Also, non-Belgians I meet rarely know two-thirds speak Dutch
| rather than French.
| beermonster wrote:
| A lot of this is described in the book 'The Age of Surveillance
| Capitalism' by author Professor Shoshana Zuboff[1]. There's
| also a good documentary on Netflix (I forget which, I think
| it's 'The Great Hack'[2]), explaining how the 'Cambridge
| Analytica' scandal utilised personal data and more importantly
| behaviour.
|
| They're just scarily good at predicting what you are going to
| do. They're not listening in. It's far scarier/more insidious
| than that.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...
|
| [2] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542
| samanator wrote:
| Why is this downvoted? It provides useful information with
| sources.
| ir77 wrote:
| My wife works with digital ads - on sale side, not tech - and
| the products that they offer in terms of geofencing goes
| something like this: they have a bucket of tracked people that
| went to a car show or a dodge dealer that they can then push
| ads from a local Toyota, or whomever her customer is. They
| further can track and determine how many of those people
| actually went to the said advertised dealer.
|
| They did a compare for one dealer: out of 150 people that got
| pushed ads for the dealership 12 ended up buying cars there
| afterwards - on a higher $ purchase that's pretty significant
| conversion.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Ads are a pretty good proxy for how much profit a sale is.
| While a car is a high $ purchase, moving your $40/month
| cellular plan from one provider to another is $thousands of
| profit loss for one provider and $thousands profit for
| another.
| juskrey wrote:
| Did they compare to the similar group of people who did not
| get ads?
| [deleted]
| secondcoming wrote:
| These days this is a basic offering of any adtech company and
| is full of quite a lot of BS.
| slothtrop wrote:
| When I was shopping for wedding rings, I started seeing ads for
| Peoples when streaming on tv and on the SO's own phone. This
| despite the fact I usually browse with an ad-blocker, no-
| script, and delete cookies. The tracking is remarkably
| invasive.
| akersten wrote:
| How do you know your SO wasn't getting ads for wedding rings
| simply because she was thinking about getting married too?
| slothtrop wrote:
| First the timeline, second that she confirmed she wasn't
| shopping around or investigating wedding-related items.
| djhworld wrote:
| > To me, the stupidest simplest solution is probably the most
| likely - some naive marketing analyst probably just grouped all
| traffic coming from the same IP address into the same bucket
| and blasted ads to them based on recent Amazon purchases at the
| same IP address.
|
| I agree with this as well. I've been living back at my parents
| house for a bit while I'm between properties, and I definitely
| see ads for stuff targeted at my parents. Sometimes I worry
| there might be a privacy breach there, e.g. my Dad has been
| suffering from a condition recently and I've seen ads for
| coping with it come up on my computer, most likely based on his
| google searches or whatever.
| jahewson wrote:
| Because you're on the same wifi network behind a NAT and have the
| same public IP?
| cupofcoffee wrote:
| Trivial solution: make a tool that pumps tons of fake data to the
| point where no algorithm can separate the signal from the noise.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Here is the interesting part:
|
| _> If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another
| phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web
| of people I 'm in regular contact with._
|
| _> So. They know my mom 's toothpaste. They know I was at my
| mom's. They know my Twitter. Now I get Twitter ads for mom's
| toothpaste._
| politelemon wrote:
| I think he's arrived at the wrong conclusion. It's more likely
| because he shared an IP address with the original targeted user
| (mother). Occam's IP.
|
| That said, I'd expect a privacy tech worker to have adblocking
| on their devices and such a thing to not happen in the first
| place.
| modeless wrote:
| Yes, whenever these stories come around, 90% of the time it
| can be explained by shared IP. It's not GPS. It's not
| microphones. It's not cameras. It's actually simple. You
| connected to someone's WiFi. You got their public IP. It's a
| unique 32-bit number, easiest thing in the world to store and
| associate. Now you are associated for a while and get some of
| the same ads.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Which in turn is a good thing, right? Because people seem
| to get pooled together and the ads aren't clever enough to
| distinguish.
| afterburner wrote:
| It's bad that they're trying to track you in any way.
| politelemon wrote:
| Quite interesting, I hadn't even thought of it this way.
| In a way, VPNs could be pretty useful in this regard, as
| you share the same IP as several other people. So you'd
| be subject to irrelevant ads about the same topic that
| most of them are searching for.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| I assume that even though I use a vpn and have ads
| blocked almost completely, my browser is fingerprinted
| and my phone tracked so that I'm giving valuable data
| almost all the time anyway.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Lot of advertising targeting doesn't bother going below
| the household level anyway, which IP sorta-kinda
| corresponds to.
| amelius wrote:
| Why is this a good thing?
|
| If I follow someone to a number of different locations
| with Wifi, then I can learn a lot about them by using a
| simple intersection of the ads I'm now getting.
|
| For instance, if I get ads about diapers in all
| locations, then I have a strong reason to conclude that
| the person I'm following is pregnant or has a baby.
| shoto_io wrote:
| If you follow someone that closely from location to
| location you won't need to cross check your ads to learn
| stuff about them, I guess.
| erhk wrote:
| Well it sounds like one router will tell me about
| toothpaste so why not diapers
| modeless wrote:
| I don't really consider it a good thing. I think VPNs
| should be the default for everyone. But yes, it means
| that ad networks aren't surreptitiously listening to your
| spoken conversations. They are just doing the most brain-
| dead obvious correlations.
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