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Could it have been the opposite direction? The advertiser targeted an ad to everyone using $YOUR_FAMILY_NAME as a keyword? I haven't seen one of these (despite

Could it have been the opposite direction? The advertiser targeted an ad to everyone using $YOUR_FAMILY_NAME as a keyword? I haven't seen one of these (despite my email address being firstname@lastname.com), but my family name isn't very common. According to https://forebears.io https://forebears.io my surname is >275,000 in commonality, so maybe I'm too far down the list. How common is your surname?

bsaul 6y ago
not that common. But even that scenario is weird : how did youtube know last name in the first place ? Either they split my email ( but that would be really random especially considering spelling), or they got it from facebook because that's the only place. A third option is if they parsed my emails to find it... but that would be completely out of the line.
- tailspin2019 6y ago
  > how did youtube know last name in the first place ? I think what shaftway was suggesting is that they just randomly placed an ad with that particular family name and blasted it out to everyone indiscriminately. If it's shown to 1000 people and 1 person happens to have that name, and the ad converts, financially it may still work out for them. Seems doubtful but it's a possibility. My comment further up was a bit flippant. I have no idea what gmail does or doesn't send, but when it comes to Google, nothing would surprise me!
  - shaftway 6y ago
    Forgot to mention, I'm a Googler, but I don't work on search, ads, or YouTube. My opinions and thoughts are my own. I posted an ad for my family name a few years ago. I was applying for new jobs and I wanted some say in what prospective employers saw about me online. I think it was 5 cents per click that I ended up paying. It's cheap enough that it's probably worth paying for them. And going through this process for yourself you can see what the targeting options are. As for how your name got in there, who knows. Maybe you searched for yourself accidentally. Maybe it was able to get it from your account name. But it's unlikely that the data was "sold" to YourNameOnATShirt.com. This wouldn't really make much business sense, the privacy policies explicitly say this won't happen, and I've never heard of anyone with actual knowledge claiming that any personal data is ever sold. It looks like you can opt out of this kind of ad personalization here though: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated

bsaul 6y ago

not that common. But even that scenario is weird : how did youtube know last name in the first place ? Either they split my email ( but that would be really random especially considering spelling), or they got it from facebook because that's the only place. A third option is if they parsed my emails to find it... but that would be completely out of the line.

tailspin2019 6y ago
> how did youtube know last name in the first place ? I think what shaftway was suggesting is that they just randomly placed an ad with that particular family name and blasted it out to everyone indiscriminately. If it's shown to 1000 people and 1 person happens to have that name, and the ad converts, financially it may still work out for them. Seems doubtful but it's a possibility. My comment further up was a bit flippant. I have no idea what gmail does or doesn't send, but when it comes to Google, nothing would surprise me!
- shaftway 6y ago
  Forgot to mention, I'm a Googler, but I don't work on search, ads, or YouTube. My opinions and thoughts are my own. I posted an ad for my family name a few years ago. I was applying for new jobs and I wanted some say in what prospective employers saw about me online. I think it was 5 cents per click that I ended up paying. It's cheap enough that it's probably worth paying for them. And going through this process for yourself you can see what the targeting options are. As for how your name got in there, who knows. Maybe you searched for yourself accidentally. Maybe it was able to get it from your account name. But it's unlikely that the data was "sold" to YourNameOnATShirt.com. This wouldn't really make much business sense, the privacy policies explicitly say this won't happen, and I've never heard of anyone with actual knowledge claiming that any personal data is ever sold. It looks like you can opt out of this kind of ad personalization here though: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated