7 ms·

I have mentioned this before here - instagram ads are a bit too creepy. I have had multiple personal ads that were eerily accurate and I hadn’t even discussed t

I have mentioned this before here - instagram ads are a bit too creepy. I have had multiple personal ads that were eerily accurate and I hadn’t even discussed these things over any written form. I’m not paranoid to think they are listening to the microphone but the coincidence is super uncanny. It crossed the line for me twice in the past few months alone.

Zak 7y ago
I've had the opposite experience with ads on Instagram. It shows me ads for cat products (I don't have a cat), code bootcamps (I have decades of programming experience), and for a while repeatedly showed the same ad for a job as a flight instructor (I have no qualifications for such a job).
wingkongex 7y ago
They are all over the place for me. I also get a ton of strange ones that are made to look like regular people just taking pictures of themselves, I guess aspiring models? I don't even engage with IG models...I swear.
joncrane 7y ago
For me this only started happening after I offered feedback aka "Don't show me ads like this any more." Of course I realized shortly thereafter: "Do I really want better targeted ads on my Instagram feed?" It's a little too late now but if I had to do it over again I would let it guess, mostly poorly, and that makes it easier to filter out the sponsored content.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  You can always give it incorrect data to train with :) I've been muting ads from the twitter account of every ad I've seen on twitter and the tweets I get are really, really weird and often more interesting than the tweets it gave me to begin with (because now I'm mostly down to the ads that some random person spent $5 promoting as a joke). But there was a weird 2 month period where twitter was trying to determine what I did want to see and actually had real inventory to play with, and it was hilarious how wrong it would get me sometimes. As far as I can tell, this is the only way to keep your privacy - to confuse the algorithms by overloading them with random data.
  - godelski 7y ago
    Along these lines I don't have a Facebook, have tracker blockers, and other stuff. Spotify used to give me the strangest ads. I'd get some for super cuts. Then an ad about hair loss (I'm under 30 and my dad still doesn't have gray hair). Then ads in Spanish from Jared's (not even dating anyone. Plus these seemed to be targeted at women). Also I'd get TONs of ads for Spotify premium. Those were literally all the ads I got. (stopped using Spotify because after I started paying, maybe those ads worked, their Linux app broke and they said they didn't care about fixing it)
about_help 7y ago
You should be, the Facebook app explicitly does listen to the mic unless you opt out. It has also come out that Google and Amazon are storing people's personal voice requests, and aside from that the mics are always on waiting to hear the trigger words. This means by default that the apps are listening and analyzing everything, though how much of the non word-triggered speech gets recorded is unknown. Facebook's initial foray into the app/mic biz was troubled and their statement was "we only listen for popular music / TV in the background in order to help you." It also came out that they mine personal messages between users. "I’m not paranoid to think they are listening to the microphone but the coincidence is super uncanny." We need to get past the block where we label people as paranoid for thinking these big corps might invade user's privacy.
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  The Facebook app, on iPhone at least, requires you to opt in to giving it microphone access. I've seen the myth that Facebook is targeting ads based on what it hears debunked several times. Do you have a source that shows that it is in fact listening? I think it's more likely that the same reason someone is talking about something (they're in a demographic interested in that thing) is the reason that Facebook gives you ads for that thing. Add in the Baader-Meinhof effect and it seems like Facebook is listening to your conversations.
  - ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
    I am so frustrated by this "debunking", because it defies logic and experience. Let's say Facebook NEVER listens to you... I'm 100% on board with them and their honesty. It still doesn't matter. If you let ANY third party app listen to you, and identify you, for example the latest Candy Crush game, then your information along with preferences are being uploaded to databases for re-targeting. When I do a big campaign in Facebook, or any sophisticated marketer does, I don't ask Facebook for users who like Cats and are looking for brands of organic cat food. I PROVIDE them a pre-vetted list of people looking for cat food that I generated and the emails associated with those Facebook accounts. Facebook has NO WAY to know how I came up with my list, and no possible way to find out. It could have been from listening to conversations while someone played Candy Crush, or it could have been from a form submitted on my website. One of these days I'm just going to actually document myself doing this and publish it to a website so more people understand what is happening and how easy it is to use data from people's conversations. TLDR: Any time you buy a list of potential customers from a market research company, that data could have been gathered with conversation tracking. It's not Facebook's fault, it's just the reality.
bhk 7y ago
Perhaps other people have been discussing your personal issues in written form?
pixelrevision 7y ago
You may not have put in anything directly but they have stuff about a lot of the people you follow, recommendations to you and ML that analyzes your habits to better find info about you. Who knows what computers can infer based on all these inputs? At this point they own so much data based on all these connections they likely do not need to listen. It would be good if these companies had to be a little more transparent about how they connect all the dots.
- desas 7y ago
  Does the quality of the ads you see really make you confident that they're paying attention to all of these data points and have an amazing algorithm that ties it all together?
godelski 7y ago
Honest question. Would you actually rather have them send false hits and hide how much they're tracking? I ask this because in that infamous Forbes article about Target and the pregnant girl they mention how they now add ads for things they don't think you are interested in, in an effort to creep people out less. (To me this feels a little worse) Plenty of groups do purposefully send false hits to make it less creepy to the target.
frostburg 7y ago
Instagram thinks that I have influence over jet fighter buying decisions, they're not that good (despite the invasive methods that they surely use).
papito 7y ago
Someone did an experiment where they talked Spanish into their phone, cold, and the ads started showing up in Spanish later.

Zak 7y ago

I've had the opposite experience with ads on Instagram. It shows me ads for cat products (I don't have a cat), code bootcamps (I have decades of programming experience), and for a while repeatedly showed the same ad for a job as a flight instructor (I have no qualifications for such a job).

wingkongex 7y ago

They are all over the place for me. I also get a ton of strange ones that are made to look like regular people just taking pictures of themselves, I guess aspiring models? I don't even engage with IG models...I swear.

joncrane 7y ago

For me this only started happening after I offered feedback aka "Don't show me ads like this any more." Of course I realized shortly thereafter: "Do I really want better targeted ads on my Instagram feed?" It's a little too late now but if I had to do it over again I would let it guess, mostly poorly, and that makes it easier to filter out the sponsored content.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chipperyman573 7y ago
You can always give it incorrect data to train with :) I've been muting ads from the twitter account of every ad I've seen on twitter and the tweets I get are really, really weird and often more interesting than the tweets it gave me to begin with (because now I'm mostly down to the ads that some random person spent $5 promoting as a joke). But there was a weird 2 month period where twitter was trying to determine what I did want to see and actually had real inventory to play with, and it was hilarious how wrong it would get me sometimes. As far as I can tell, this is the only way to keep your privacy - to confuse the algorithms by overloading them with random data.
- godelski 7y ago
  Along these lines I don't have a Facebook, have tracker blockers, and other stuff. Spotify used to give me the strangest ads. I'd get some for super cuts. Then an ad about hair loss (I'm under 30 and my dad still doesn't have gray hair). Then ads in Spanish from Jared's (not even dating anyone. Plus these seemed to be targeted at women). Also I'd get TONs of ads for Spotify premium. Those were literally all the ads I got. (stopped using Spotify because after I started paying, maybe those ads worked, their Linux app broke and they said they didn't care about fixing it)

about_help 7y ago

You should be, the Facebook app explicitly does listen to the mic unless you opt out. It has also come out that Google and Amazon are storing people's personal voice requests, and aside from that the mics are always on waiting to hear the trigger words. This means by default that the apps are listening and analyzing everything, though how much of the non word-triggered speech gets recorded is unknown. Facebook's initial foray into the app/mic biz was troubled and their statement was "we only listen for popular music / TV in the background in order to help you." It also came out that they mine personal messages between users. "I’m not paranoid to think they are listening to the microphone but the coincidence is super uncanny." We need to get past the block where we label people as paranoid for thinking these big corps might invade user's privacy.

RandallBrown 7y ago
The Facebook app, on iPhone at least, requires you to opt in to giving it microphone access. I've seen the myth that Facebook is targeting ads based on what it hears debunked several times. Do you have a source that shows that it is in fact listening? I think it's more likely that the same reason someone is talking about something (they're in a demographic interested in that thing) is the reason that Facebook gives you ads for that thing. Add in the Baader-Meinhof effect and it seems like Facebook is listening to your conversations.
- ghostbrainalpha 7y ago
  I am so frustrated by this "debunking", because it defies logic and experience. Let's say Facebook NEVER listens to you... I'm 100% on board with them and their honesty. It still doesn't matter. If you let ANY third party app listen to you, and identify you, for example the latest Candy Crush game, then your information along with preferences are being uploaded to databases for re-targeting. When I do a big campaign in Facebook, or any sophisticated marketer does, I don't ask Facebook for users who like Cats and are looking for brands of organic cat food. I PROVIDE them a pre-vetted list of people looking for cat food that I generated and the emails associated with those Facebook accounts. Facebook has NO WAY to know how I came up with my list, and no possible way to find out. It could have been from listening to conversations while someone played Candy Crush, or it could have been from a form submitted on my website. One of these days I'm just going to actually document myself doing this and publish it to a website so more people understand what is happening and how easy it is to use data from people's conversations. TLDR: Any time you buy a list of potential customers from a market research company, that data could have been gathered with conversation tracking. It's not Facebook's fault, it's just the reality.

bhk 7y ago

Perhaps other people have been discussing your personal issues in written form?

pixelrevision 7y ago

You may not have put in anything directly but they have stuff about a lot of the people you follow, recommendations to you and ML that analyzes your habits to better find info about you. Who knows what computers can infer based on all these inputs? At this point they own so much data based on all these connections they likely do not need to listen. It would be good if these companies had to be a little more transparent about how they connect all the dots.

desas 7y ago
Does the quality of the ads you see really make you confident that they're paying attention to all of these data points and have an amazing algorithm that ties it all together?

godelski 7y ago

Honest question. Would you actually rather have them send false hits and hide how much they're tracking? I ask this because in that infamous Forbes article about Target and the pregnant girl they mention how they now add ads for things they don't think you are interested in, in an effort to creep people out less. (To me this feels a little worse) Plenty of groups do purposefully send false hits to make it less creepy to the target.

frostburg 7y ago

Instagram thinks that I have influence over jet fighter buying decisions, they're not that good (despite the invasive methods that they surely use).

papito 7y ago

Someone did an experiment where they talked Spanish into their phone, cold, and the ads started showing up in Spanish later.