10 ms·

Ask HN: How was this ad targeted to me?

• FroshKiller 10y ago
  You can (or at least could) absolutely target individuals with Facebook ads. Check out this prank: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/ https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...
  • maaarghk 10y ago
    This is the best thing I've read all month. Thanks for posting!
  • smnscu 10y ago
    Fantastic read. Reminds me of: https://www.facebook.com/notes/robin-sloan/julie-rubicon/985697811525170 https://www.facebook.com/notes/robin-sloan/julie-rubicon/985...
    • i336_ 10y ago
      That was awesome too. The comments are great as well.
  • alanfalcon 10y ago
    I can't decide whether to share this with my friends or keep this in my back pocket...
  • jehna1 10y ago
    True story: Proposed my wife with a Facebook ad.
    • inputcoffee 10y ago
      Tell us more. I can't believe this is not a medium post.
• NKCSS 10y ago
  It's called re-targeting. You can use javascript to put users into a segment and re-target that segement; it's really easy. If you use the biggest ad-exchange (AppNexus) you can be sure to reach just about anyone anywhere.
  • stygiansonic 10y ago
    This is correct. Retargeting is one of the most valued aspects of adtech. Manufacturers website contains an iframe to the ad networks website. They signed up for this by placing JS snippet from the ad network on their site that created the iframe. This allows ad network to know that you've visited by placing cookie. Next time you visit site that shows ads from this network they can inspect cookie and show you the retargeted ads. Could have been FB in this case. Their ad platform definitely allows for retargeting.
    • mxvzr 10y ago
      Although they wouldn't have used a cookie here since it is mentioned that different browsers & devices were used. It would mean that segmenting was done on the backend, maybe using a user id from a social network.
      • msumpter 10y ago
        Cross devices targeting has become prevalent for most adtech targeting, at it's most basic they will correlate your public IP address but there are other methods for correlation.
  • thom_nic 10y ago
    How is it OK to do this if the browser is sending DNT? Is it really voluntary on the part of the ad network and they can just choose to ignore it?
    • mrgreenfur 10y ago
      Yes, most of them just ignore it.
• anacleto 10y ago
  Did you leave your email? If so, this is plausible flow: 1. You visit website xyz.com 2. You signed up at xyz.com and you dropped during checkout funnel 3. You're email address is being added a FaceBook retargeting campaign and Adwords campaign
• dedalus 10y ago
  Here's the company behind that: http://www.criteo.com/ http://www.criteo.com/ Its a 3 billion French company whose sole job is to show ads for products abandoned in the cart or something you bought 6 months ago or something that their personalization algorithm suggests
  • anacleto 10y ago
    Technically this is not correct. You can achieve the very same result using different products (eg. Adroll, Exponential Interactive) or even using Google and Facebook natively. [0] https://www.adroll.com/ https://www.adroll.com/ [1] http://exponential.com/ http://exponential.com/
  • user5994461 10y ago
    Ironically, that's the only good tech employer in France :D
    • nojvek 10y ago
      I wonder if the only action against them is sending them so much traffic their servers can't keep up. I feel with the advent of internet of shit, this will start becoming more of commonplace
      • user5994461 10y ago
        They likely have billions dollars in infrastructure, you're not gonna DDoS them. They are the one DDoSing you with ads.
      • mxvzr 10y ago
        Client side re-targeting has two pieces to it: a "segment" code placed on the product page (a marker showing you have interest in this particular product) and a "burn" code placed on the conversion page (that removes the previous marker, so they can stop showing you ads for this product once you bought it). One could add the "burn" code every time the "segment" code is detected. On some networks that may even result in an affiliate payout.
• amelius 10y ago
  > But is this direct-to-an-individual targetting even possible on Fb? Why not? If the FB like-button sends the cookie for your FB session, then it can make the connection between your account and the product. Besides, it is also possible that you talked with a friend about the product, and this friend searched for the product in e.g. Facebook, and by being friends with this person on Facebook, they now show the ad to you as well.
• Oras 10y ago
  Similar things happening to me in Youtube. I got suggestions about similar things I watch at work which I used totally different gmail account from my Android TV! So technically these two are not connected. Some times I use my work gmail account at my laptop at home so I assume Google is aggregating data based on IP address.
• Bedon292 10y ago
  Facebook doesn't need to be open in a tab for it to know it was you on that site, and you don't even need to be signed in. You and your computers are connected, even if you think you are careful. If you have ever signed into FB from home, they know that machine / ip / whatever fingerprint is you. Even after you sign out, its still out. Even if you are in ingocnito mode, its still probably you. Then you sign in to FB at work, and now the same thing happens. They may not know the specific computer, but they know the network you are connected to IP wise. This happens across many different ad networks, and they are all connected to sell ads targeting the people something wants. If you leave a potential purchase not bough, and sometimes even when you do buy it, ads are going to make it back to 'you'. They may not know 100% that it is you, but they can cast a net to try and find you. And for something like a missed sale, its worth the cost. Note it may not be targeting you specifically. It may just be closer to: Someone in this VERY specific demographic looked for this instrument, oh hey here is someone else that meets that same demographic on this other ad network. Lets try them. The amount of tracking on the internet nowadays is absolutely crazy. Visit practically any website, and all the major players are going to know about it and add it to their profile of you.
  • masukomi 10y ago
    as someone who used to work for a targeted advertising co i can confirm that, overall, this is pretty accurate. And, nearly a decade ago we were doing work to connect fingerprint x and fingerprint y when they were actually the same person (usually on different computers or maybe in incognito). Conceptually it wasn't hard. People tend behave the same way regardless of what computer they're on. I'd be VERY surprised to hear that Google hasn't made a ton of progress in connecting fingerprints
    • throwgoogle123 10y ago
      I work on ads at Google. As far as I know we don't connect users who are not logged in out of piracy concern.
      • Clanan 10y ago
• chmackenzie 10y ago
  Logging out of Facebook doesn't mean they won't be able to track you. Your browser fingerprint is likely tracked. If you've logged into Facebook at home, and you've logged into a computer at work, Audience Network likely figures out that your residential IP is your home, and an aggregated commercial network is your work. If you visited the manufacturer's site, you would have hit a re-targeting pixel for the network, that will track you around the internet to remind you. At work, on your phone, at school, and at home.
• sundaeofshock 10y ago
  The answer is cookies. Facebook sets multiple cookies on your browser that do not expire and are not deleted when you logout. By logging in at work and home, you are making it trivial for them to track you. They also set this cookie when you intract with a Facebook like, share, comment or use Facebook to log-in to a third-party site. A few suggestions to help mitigate this: - Use a browser dedicated to all your social media browsing and another browser for everything else. Say Firefox for Facebook and Twitter, and Chrome for everything else. That will restrict what they can capture. - Browser Facebook in your browser's incognito it private mode. - Minimize third-party links you follow from your Facebook timeline. And don't shop and Facebook in the same browser! - Don't interact with Facebook outside of their actual site. This includes likes and comments. - Don't use Facebook as your log-in credential. - Use an ad blocker! - Have your browsers delete all cookies on log out. This is both your day-to-day and social media browsers. Facebook is not the only media company tracking you.
  • masukomi 10y ago
    i assure you, that you can still be tracked without cookies. It's not as easy, but it's definitely possible to fingerprint a browser and track its requests to a server even if there aren't cookies. The level of confidence will be good enough for advertising.
    • sundaeofshock 10y ago
      Indeed. Which is why I like to use a separate browser for social media. Having said this I know it's a losing battle, but I see no reason to make it easy on the bastards. (I've worked in ad tech in a previous life)
  • yodsanklai 10y ago
    > The answer is cookies. Facebook sets multiple cookies on your browser that do not expire and are not deleted when you logout. By logging in at work and home, you are making it trivial for them to track you. I don't understand how cookies could explain the scenario described in the question. Can you explain?
• shawnz 10y ago
  > I assume no outright nefarious activity, such as an illicit pipe of potential customer IDs between Fb and Google. Where do Facebook or Google claim not to share advertising data with their partners?
• dollaholla 10y ago
  https://www.facebook.com/business/a/performance-marketing-strategies https://www.facebook.com/business/a/performance-marketing-st...
• jorgemf 10y ago
  There are so many ways: - you opened a web page with a facebook's like button and facebook analyzed your browse history. If you browse for something in google shopping you might want to buy it, so facebook added it to your interests and showed an ad later to you. (Probably this was the cause) - google and facebook knows your location because you have a google/facebook app in your mobile. It is easy to know where you work and where do you live. Even without GPS, as they can use the wifi public IP to know your location (among other things) - your browse makes a fingerprint unique to you, even if you are not logged into any platform or you don't have an account on them they know you are you. So they can collect data. If you later login into facebook/google they match the fingerprint with your user. They can also use several fingerprint, because you use several devices. I think this is called supercookies. There are companies that just do this. - you have two different devices with two different accounts, but you have the phone number of the other in your contact list and sometimes you have both devices with you. Facebook/google will suppose you both share same interests and show ads that match one of your devices to the other. - "do not track" is a suggestion, some people ignore it because they really want to track you. - google and facebook probably use other ad networks to sever ads, so facebook probably asked google (or another ad network) for an ad for you. You probably shared your phone number / email in both facebook and google. - if you want to be fancy, machine learning could also help to target ads for you, but I think the other ways are so easy to do and work so well that you don't need complex things to show ads, just track the user.
  • yodsanklai 10y ago
    > you opened a web page with a facebook's like button and facebook analyzed your browse history How could facebook (or any website) access your browsing history? they know what link you access from their pages, but apart from that, can they get any info from the browser?
    • alanfalcon 10y ago
      More like 80% of the web pages you opened included the Facebook Like button, so they have 80% of your browsing history right there.
    • 10y ago
• akerro 10y ago
  Use Facebook only from their onion-service using dedicated (TorBrowser) browser. https://facebookcorewwwi.onion https://facebookcorewwwi.onion
• Steeeve 10y ago
  The other answers here seem to cover most of everything, but one more possibility to add to the mix - prefetching. Just because you don't click on a link doesn't mean that you aren't already going there. Chrome (and other browsers) prefetch pages so that they will load faster when you click on them. I haven't delved into this in a while, so I can't say I've tested anytime in the last 5 years. I did a quick search and found this page that talks about how to disable the functionality in chrome: https://www.technipages.com/google-chrome-prefetch https://www.technipages.com/google-chrome-prefetch I'm always surprised that more people don't seem to know about this.
• nargella 10y ago
  I used to work in this exact industry and wrote my employer's tracking code. You didn't clarify whether you clicked on a google shopping product and landed on a product page. That's all that is needed. Many ecommerce sites use both google and facebook for their campaigns. So by you landing on the product page, a standard facebook event would be fired. The website or the advertiser doesn't really need to know who you are but facebook does know who you are once that event is fired. Facebook can then tie you to a campaign around that product for that same website (if they have an active campaign going).
• snikolic 10y ago
  Former VP-Eng at a product-ads ad-tech company here... You can think of this as a two step process. First, connecting your Facebook UID to structured data about a specific product in a product catalog. Second, connecting your FB UID to multiple devices/browsers without cookies. I think the second part (cross-device matching) has been explained well by other commenters: tere are multiple techniques involving IPs, hardware footprints, browser footprints, browsing habits, etc. I want to clarify a few things about how the first part most likely occurred. There's been a lot of emphasis in discussion on the FB "Like" button. It's true that this is a possible way for FB to observe you have visited a specific webpage. However, it's more likely that there was a Facebook "pixel" on a retailer's website (some commenters have been referring to this as "javascript" or "retargeting"). Most e-commerce sellers use these today. They're basically a FB web endpoint that the retailer can pass structured metadata to that lets the retailer communicate to FB that an event has occurred on their website. FB allows retailers to send all kinds of metadata about all sorts of events - page loads, add to carts, checkouts, purchases, in-app events, and custom events. The retailer can also send very detailed info about the content being interacted with on a webpage, down to sub-SKU granularity (e.g. not just a particular shoe, but a specific color/size/variant of that shoe). Historically, the FB web endpoint would return a 1x1 transparent image so that a retailer could embed it on their website's HTML and a customer's browser is "tricked" into loading the image from a third-party domain. Thus the name "pixel". This is still frequently done, but nowadays the endpoint may just be a REST endpoint and/or may be called via AJAX (or via an SDK within a mobile app). Facebook also allows retailers to upload their Product Catalogs to Facebook. These are basically a CSV of structured metadata about every product the retailer has for sale. Then, when the retailer sends a pixel event to say SKU 12345 has been interacted with by a user, Facebook can reference that SKU in the retailer's Product Catalog to learn all kinds of info about it. A really interesting exercise is to install the FB Pixel Helper extension for Chrome (I'm sure there are equivalents for other browsers). It will show you all FB pixels loaded on a given page and what metadata was passed along. Keep an eye on it as you browse the web, especially the next time you browse an e-commerce website. Facebook basically sees everything that happens. They may as well be ingesting everyone's Apache/Nginx logs. :-P https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-pixel-helper/fdgfkebogiimcoedlicjlajpkdmockpc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-pixel-hel... (Note: I'm not affiliated with this extension in any way)
• n3dst4 10y ago
  > a semi-obscure muscial instrument (which I won't name, my paranoia is already piqued). It was a Theremin, wasn't it?
  • austinjp 10y ago
    Nope :)
• crispyambulance 10y ago
  Adtech discussions like this always raise the hair on the back of my neck. The only thing that makes me feel better is that "my data" is being handled by a piece of software somewhere for the EXPRESS purpose of pushing advertising to me. I don't believe it will feel like a privacy violation for most people UNTIL we start seeing high-profile incidents where actual human beings get caught looking up and acting upon individuals and their data as people and not programmatically as GUID's with bunch of metadata. It makes me wonder if entities are buying their way into these adtech data streams for purposes OTHER than market research or directed advertising ?
• mambodog 10y ago
  Rather than speculating, you can find out why you're seeing a particular ad on fb. There's a drop down on each ad which includes a menu item which explains the targeting method used: https://www.google.com/amp/www.business2community.com/facebook/seeing-ads-facebook-01564734/amp https://www.google.com/amp/www.business2community.com/facebo...
  • mercer 10y ago
    Yes, because when speculating about how much Facebook knows about me, the most likely source of truth is Facebook itself! That said, thanks for pointing out this functionality. While I might be suspicious of the degree of truth it offers, it's at least something (honestly).
• debt 10y ago
  assume every time you hit a googlebook server they assign a confidence score related to potential identity or demographic and rank. "what are the odds this is a woman? a doctor? a person living in Louisville? Is this Jane Doe?" each of the answers to those questions get a confidence score and a rank. then you're shown ads based on whichever verticals you rank the highest. I think it just means their statistical approximations are getting good. theories idk
• achairapart 10y ago
  I spent the last weekend in another city X. I took with me my macbook but I didn’t used it, so it was closed in sleep mode the whole time. However, I did some searches over the weekend on my iPhone, Safari in private mode, not logged in. Back home, opened the macbook, did some search with an incognito browser window. And Google told me: You are in another city X, based on your browser history (!). What?! Privacy is hard nowadays.
• nommm-nommm 10y ago
  This is pretty much the reason I block ads. If they weren't so intrusive and stalky I wouldn't mind them too much.
• inputcoffee 10y ago
  I do everything you do, but recently I have added one more habit thanks to Opera's beautifully easy VPN: I google search on Opera using their VPN.
• ar-jan 10y ago
  Here's an interesting read [0] about making inferences about such questions. Story of someone who deduces audio fingerprinting must have been responsible for a particular promoted tweet (before audio fingerprinting was known to be used). 0: https://slack-files.com/T0317T6QB-F04FJ2YAC-88e35e6787 https://slack-files.com/T0317T6QB-F04FJ2YAC-88e35e6787
• grok2 10y ago
  This should answer your question -- straight from the horses's mouth! https://www.facebook.com/help/206635839404055 https://www.facebook.com/help/206635839404055 Edit: Using something like https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger helps avoid this kind of tracking while not being too painful to use visiting web-sites.
• mdekkers 10y ago
  "do not track" in Firefox or Chrome. Completely ignored pretty much everywhere...
• markgamache1 10y ago
  Lol! Free isn't free. Your desires are a commodity up for sale. The how doesn't matter. When you discover and block one way, another is created. This happened because you use Google and Facebook.
• owly 10y ago
  uBlock, uMatrix & host based blocklists are the price of entry these days. https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/tree/master/corporations https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/tree/master/corporatio... Block at your router if you can, then any mobile devices on your network enjoy ad/tracker blocking too.
• bjoern_cliqz 10y ago
  Here is an interesting article about this topic: https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/how-facebook-knows-exactly-what-turns-you-on https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/how-facebook-knows-exactly-wha...
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• lazyjones 10y ago
  This is just FB tracking you everywhere and recognising your account even though you are logged out, from cookies (possibly local storage, IP address, other browser fingerprinting methods). This just happened to me: I visited booking.com earlier today, then FB showed me a FB ad with the same hotels I had looked at.