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Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?
My girlfriend came to check out some open houses with me yesterday after work. By 10 PM, she was seeing ads on Instagram for new houses. She hasn't shopped for a house before, or even done any searches on Google on that topic. I simply invited her to come with me and she did.
Similarly, we were at her place the other day and watched a kung fu movie on my laptop (connected to her wifi), and then went to bed. The next morning she started seeing ads for martial arts schools in the area.
What is happening?
She doesn't have an Amazon Echo or anything else that might be listening, although she does have an Android phone. She most likely has the default (stock) settings and apps. Regardless, I want to help her improve her privacy. What steps should I take (other than installing ad-blockers on her phone)?
Corollary: Is this what the Internet is like for "regular" people? If so, holy shit. I'm glad I use uBlock Origin on my computers and an iPhone.
- firefoxd 9y agoIf you have enough data point for enough people in a large enough area, well machine learning will do the trick[1]. [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/machine-learning-ads https://idiallo.com/blog/machine-learning-ads
- BLKNSLVR 9y agoThe brilliance and scariness of the possibility that this may be where advertising technology is at reminds me of this sentiment that I can't remember the source of: "All the brightest human minds in the world are working for advertising companies"
- JPLeRouzic 9y agoI am not in this field and I believe some guys here already explained it much clearly than me. 1. Checking Open houses: Many apps are authorized by most users to access their location. Ads space providers qualify their data, that is the way they earn their life. Then if one Ad client works in real estate, the Ads space, sorry your girlfriend phone screen, is a nice target for real estate Ads. 2. Kung fu ads: A Ads space provider for some of the ads may have noticed that several different user agents come from the same IP adress, so it inferred incorrectly that they belong to the same person.
- aylmao 9y ago^ Probably correct, +1. I'd like to add that Android by default tracks your location constantly [1]. I recently got a Pixel and was staying in a hotel. Every night I came back to the hotel room it would ask me to rate it or upload pictures of it to Google Maps. It can be disabled in Settings, iirc. [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb
- adtechperson 9y agoI have worked for a number of ad tech companies over the years. If this really is happening (and it seems possible it could be coincidence) the most likely explanation is cross device targeting using IP address. So, most ad tech companies do cross device targeting, using device maps bought from other companies (Drawbridge being one). These companies attempt to assign a variety of devices from the same person to a single advertising profile. The simplest way they do this is by IP address. So if they have an IP address with a small number of devices, they decide it is probably a household and assign all those devices to the same advertising profile. So, by being on the same wifi together (either at your place or hers) they will show ads on her devices based on your behavior (and vice versa). The other explanations are possible, but I think this is the most likely
- patcheudor 9y agoThis is the correct answer. We noticed this happening in our small lab and decided to run some tests and in fact if one person searched for something odd like 'Swedish fish' then visited sites selling Swedish fish, everyone in the lab would start to get ads for candy and snack food. Similarly, searching for "mountain bike" would result in everyone else seeing ads for bikes and bike accessories. It sort of became a game to figure out what the test search term of the day was.
- otakucode 9y agoMany would probably hear of experiences like that and think 'hey that sounds unintentional or like behavior the advertiser wouldn't want' but it actually sounds brilliant from a pure effectiveness point of view. You don't just show an ad to an interested person.... you increase the chance that the person will hear about the thing from people in their immediate vicinity. And what's the best advertising in the universe that no one can buy? Word of mouth. Advertisers had better be paying through the nose for this sort of access, because it's insanely valuable.
- jackgolding 9y agoWe get this all the time in our office for salesforce (half of our team uses it.)
- rthomas6 9y agoThe Facebook app tracks location and other peoples' locations, and makes assumptions based on people being at the same place at the same time. If Facebook (or whoever) knows that several other people are all interested in new houses, and all those people + your girlfriend go to the same place(s), Facebook decides that your girlfriend might have the same interest as all those other people.
- dboreham 9y agoThis kind of "air-gap join" definitely happens based on my own experience. e.g. I get shown ads for products my kids are interested in, where I am sure I never interacted in any way online with the vendor. Also I had a /24 IP block and used some addresses for my neighbors' connections (different to our IP but within the same block). Neighbors reported seeing ads for products we bought. In fact we would joke about it, ask each other why we were seeing ads for xxx weird and unusual thing. I'll guess that the following join keys could be used: IP address or IP address subnet Physical location / postal address Known family or romantic relationship Offline key match such as use of the same credit card
- amelius 9y agoNote that this is not data leaking from one person to the other. Here the ad networks know specifically that the two people are doing stuff together, but that they are not the same person.
- yongjik 9y ago> Is this what the Internet is like for "regular" people? If so, holy shit. I'm glad I use uBlock Origin on my computers and an iPhone. Somewhere, in a dark corner in a AWS datacenter in Oregon, some third-party tracking software records "Hey, the only user within five-mile radius that blocks our ad links just finished watching a kung fu movie."
- dictum 9y agoIf you're going to get fingerprinted anyway, might as well save the bandwidth.
- yongjik 9y agoOf course, I have nothing against saving bandwidth. I just didn't expect to see an iPhone user non-ironically calling Android users as "regular people" these days. What year is it now? :P
- masukomi 9y agoi don't think it was because of the phone but because enraged_camel takes preventative measures to block tracking tools and "normal people" do not. note that it's "on my computers and...." not just "iphone"
- danso 9y agoBesides ad-blockers, turn off location tracking in apps. I forgot how it is for Android, but in iOS you can disable location tracking on an app-by-app basis. And you can also partially disable it -- only allow it when the app is active, as opposed to background tracking.
- jvalencia 9y agoIt seems to me as though this is the exact reason that Zuck was called in to testify. We have a reasonable understanding and can at least comment intelligently, but the public sees this, and clearly calls fowl. Being unable to stop it, they demand action from their senators. There's a reckoning coming I reckon --- it reminds me of GDPR in Europe.
- birdmanjeremy 9y agoIt could just be targeting. While it's possible something nefarious is going on, advertisers are really good at using available data to predict information that was never provided. In the case of the kung fu movie, it's possible IP address was used. For the open house, there could be some location correlation, but I would bet it's more than that (age, financial profile, relationship status). You can feed a bunch of data about someone to an algorithm and predict these things with pretty high confidence. The way to avoid this is to opt out of interest based ads. iOS and Android both have options for this.
- waylandsmithers 9y agoMy guess would be: 1) Facebook (ie instagram) knows you are in a relationship 2) Facebook knows girlfriend's location from being signed in (on Instagram) 3) Facebook knows locations are at open houses from data gathered from other users or around the web. Or maybe Facebook knows that going to a few totally new random residential locations in a short period of time, combined with girlfriend's other engagement activities means user is looking for a new place to live.
- eb0la 9y agoNot just with facebook, there are more options: You can geofence users (probably the realtor does it) and then send targeted ads to audiences that touch more than one geofenced area. For the kung-fu panda and martial arts. Do you share wifi and (public) ip addresses with your girlfirend?
- lunchables 9y agoAlso the fact that both of them are in the same physical location frequently, at key times, even if your hadn't set your relationship status it might figure it out.
- Rjevski 9y agoStart by switching to iOS, then for each app she installs make sure location permissions are denied. On the laptop, make sure uBlock Origin is installed.
- amelius 9y agoIP address is sort of equivalent to location. Cellphone tower is similarly equivalent to location.
- Rjevski 9y agoThe IP can be used to correlate them being together (connected to their home WiFi), but would be unable to track them outside (unless the phones try to connect to “free” public WiFi which is subsidised by ads and will no doubt rat the users out to Facebook). Cell phone towers don’t correlate to IPs at all; the IP layer is added way above all that at the GGSN in the carrier’s network, which doesn’t even know nor care which tower you’re connected to.
- amelius 9y ago> The IP can be used to correlate them being together There you go. Speaking of wifi, by correlating IP address and MAC broadcasts, ad networks could figure out your MAC address. This could also be used to track your location.
- Rjevski 9y agoCorrelating that they’re together wouldn’t explain how the ad networks figured out they were outside looking at houses. MAC addresses are never transmitted past the first layer 2 hop, so it would require either a compromised switch/access point (like public WiFi) to be nearby and the phone to connect to it (phones randomise MACs when searching for networks to protect against that).
- Zak 9y agoStart by buying an expensive piece of hardware running a different operating system? Why not just use the app permissions built into Android 6.0+?
- txsh 9y agoThis was happening to me until I removed Facebook and Facebook Messenger from my phone. I believe these apps listen to conversations even when you aren’t using them. I am not alone in believing this.
- jdlyga 9y agoJust revoke microphone access.
- methodover 9y agoThat is unreasonable conspiratorial thinking. Please don't believe it.
- thebouv 9y agoExcept when it is real: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/block-ultrasonic-signals-didnt-know-tracking/ https://www.wired.com/2016/11/block-ultrasonic-signals-didnt... https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/ultrasonic-tracking-signals-apps.html https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/ultrasonic-tracking-signal... https://www.wired.com/2017/05/hundreds-apps-can-listen-beacons-cant-hear/ https://www.wired.com/2017/05/hundreds-apps-can-listen-beaco...
- lozf 9y agoThis kind of Ultrasonic tracking i.e listening for a set of specific frequencies that are too high for most humans to perceive is much less complex then actual speech recognition, and consequently much more pragmatic.
- dingaling 9y agoSay that only half of Facebook's users have the apps: one billion Say that the average within-microphone-range presence of each user is five hours per day. Probably a huge underestimate. Do you really think that Facebook would devote enough server time to parse five billion hours of mumbling audio each and every day? That's several times longer than the total viewing of YouTube each day.
- test6554 9y ago1. Did she discuss looking at houses with you or anybody in emails or social media messages? 2. Did her smartphone location ever correspond with a house that is listed on the MLS in the past week?
- yish 9y agoDid either one of you login to amazon, Facebook, google, etc on one of the other persons device? If so there is likely still a tracking cookie associating you with her device. And your searches are causing her device to be targeted.
- Talyen42 9y agodid you invite her to come see the open house by texting her "hey, wanna come see an open house"?
- ppod 9y agoif you mean whatsapp, the content of messages is not available to whatsapp/facebook systems (it's end-to-end encrypted).
- conductr 9y agobut they have the keys, and can't be trusted
- Rjevski 9y agoThey could still extract keywords on the sender or recipient device and send them independently of the message; the message is still encrypted but keywords such as “buy” and “house” were submitted to Facebook anyway. I don’t buy the “end to end encryption” argument. If the app used encryption for the benefit of their users it would absolutely make no sense for Facebook to buy them for billions. The reason FB did so anyway is that they have a workaround the E2E encryption like described above.
- sigjuice 9y agoDoes WhatsApp make it clear what "end" means and how many so-called "ends" you are transmitting a message to?
- jstarfish 9y ago...unless your software keyboard is logging your keystrokes and sending those home.
- CGamesPlay 9y agoA totally plausible explanation for this (as plausible as any Amazon Echo passive speech recognition ad targeting theory) is that she's been seeing these ads for weeks, but they were completely irrelevant and her mind filtered them out until she happened to have house hunting / martial arts movies on her mind after these events.
- eloff 9y agoThis seems to be the most plausible, if least satisfying explanation.
- goshx 9y agoNice try Mark. Jokes aside, these issues are happening way too often for it to just be a coincidence. I've seen multiple friends and strangers, as well as myself, reporting that they were talking about something and then an ad shows up about that. EDIT: typo
- Rjevski 9y ago> Is this what the Internet is like for "regular" people? If so, holy shit. Presumably. Even with the best precautions (ad blocking, etc) some tracking still slips through the cracks. I don’t want to imagine what it’s like for the average idiot who installs every single crappy app, gives it all the permissions and logs in with their Facebook account into them.
- j-c-hewitt 9y agoDid you guys use zillow/trulia to look up listings?
- 4ad 9y agoI don't know how this is happening exactly, but I want to add that it has also been happening to myself and to my friends for quite some time.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- originalsimba 9y agoThis is the result of all the years of data mining and tracking. Now they can see your phone is at an open house and make an educated guess (which is all it is), that you're interested in buying homes. All your web traffic is tracked too, unless you only use sources that explicitly do not track, such as duckduckgo.com. Check out https://ssd.eff.org https://ssd.eff.org, you might find it helpful.
- vokep 9y agoSince the video of the guy talking about dog toys with chrome closed, and then seeing dog toy ads shortly after, I've become skeptical of this. So, I've begun testing it myself. I thought of something somewhat specific but random, unrelated to me, unlikely for me to see regular ads for, and now from time to time I talk about that thing. Until maybe a few weeks from now when I stop doing this, I will not be typing the thing, or anything too closely related, into any kind of text field. I've been doing it a few days so far and nothing yet.
- BLKNSLVR 9y agoAntiquing?
- rurcliped 9y agoSuppose I operate a small general practitioner healthcare facility that often has only two patients at the same time. If I offer free Wi-Fi in the waiting area, should I consider that a HIPAA violation, because I'm reasonably confident that one patient will see ads related to the other patient's medical condition?
- earenndil 9y agoDisclaimer: IANAL. But, probably: no. The ad company is the one at fault, as it is showing a patient an ad related to someone else's condition. You're not the one showing the ad,
- soared 9y agoI work in advertising (check my post history). Likely this is just "household extension". How it works: 1. You visit my website on your phone 2. I can now send ads to your phone, but not your desktop 3. I enable cross-device targeting 4. I can now send ads to your phone, laptop, and work computer 5. I enable household extension 6. I can now send ads to any device associated with your household (your girlfriend's phone and laptop, your son's tablet, etc.) The more likely explanation (for the kung fu stuff) is just random chance. You get like 500 ads a day, so some of those will coincidentally line up with things you've recently done. But your behavior (watching a kung fu movie) might have gotten you or your household added to a 3rd party audience for interest in karate, and then you get karate ads. Same for open houses - there are data providers who sell the audience "user has been to an open house recently" or more likely just "in-market for real estate services"
- DrScump 9y agoDoes she leave WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, or other non-phone communications active on her phone all the time?
- jones1618 9y agoLast Summer, I was on a Boy Scout trip and opened Facebook Messenger and it had PRE-FILLED the text of a message with "At terminal w/ Bobby waiting to board." The spooky thing is that it somehow knew: 1) I was at the airport (OK, not so hard, maybe using WiFi or GPS). 2) So was my friend's son, Bobby (who I wasn't directly FB friends with). 3) We were at a gate waiting for our plane.. Here's the thing: I hadn't posted any kind of itinerary or booked the flights myself. So, if FB was just "guessing" and did this every time a friend-of-a-friend was at the same place, you'd constantly be paired up with relative strangers crossing paths nearby.