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After a week at my mom’s house I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand

371 points by deadcoder0904 5y ago

greatquux 5y ago
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!
- Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
  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.
- lawn 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- prepend 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
    - cinntaile 5y ago
      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?
    - edejong 5y ago
      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.
    - rambambram 5y ago
      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.
      - dalmo3 5y ago
        Doesn't that mean ads have shaped your behaviour in a much deeper way than just nudging you to buy a thing or two?
- maccard 5y ago
  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"
- reedf1 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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  - manmal 5y ago
    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.
    - andyana 5y ago
      Organic, in my opinion, is a marketing term for the most part.
    - npteljes 5y ago
      So maybe your purchase history is unaffected, which is a great thing I'd agree, but with ads, I worry about the psychological effect too. People can't really ignore manipulation, so I don't think it's plausible to say that how you _feel_ is unaffected by advertisements. I think the only way to remain impartial to it is to be never exposed the first place.
  - fortran77 5y ago
    Exactly. The people here who believe they're too "smart" to be influenced are probably the biggest suckers!
    - npwr 5y ago
      I don't see any ads with ublock on my desktop and mobile browser. I believe the ads I don't see don't influence me. Can you believe that?
- tzs 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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/standing_73.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-lab/publications/standi... Journal Page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14640747308400340 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464074730840034...
- titzer 5y ago
  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!
lawlorino 5y ago
An alternative and much more boring explanation for this and others' stories in the replies is confirmation bias.
jarenmf 5y ago
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.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  youtube is watching you. base on ip and the content consumed they guess (and augment that guess with what they know about your brother)
- kzrdude 5y ago
  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.
shoto_io 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Which in turn is a good thing, right? Because people seem to get pooled together and the ads aren't clever enough to distinguish.
      - politelemon 5y ago
        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.
        5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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dotancohen 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
akeck 5y ago
A relative got immediately targeted by FB ads for a product we had just talked about on speakerphone.
- paulcole 5y ago
  What products have they said and then not seen ads for?
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  It's coincidence mixed with him talking about things that interest him, which are of course advertised to him.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    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.
melomal 5y ago
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.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Sounds like coincidence mixed with confirmation bias. The likelier explanation for stories like this.
  - melomal 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  >looking for holidays to book Well, I assume you weren't looking through an offline printed holiday guide of some sort :-)
  - jacob019 5y ago
    This. We always get targeted youtube ads after googling things. Creepy AF.
    - gruez 5y ago
arthur_sav 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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.
Inhibit 5y ago
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.
foreigner 5y ago
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.
Ccecil 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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.
shoto_io 5y ago
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.
bemmu 5y ago
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.
- shawnz 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    I’ve been waiting for an ad for turtle necks for over a year doing this experiment. Maybe that’s too specific?
    - cvwright 5y ago
      Start having conversations about turtlenecks and see how long it takes for the ads to show up.
      - dorkwood 5y ago
        Now that he's written the phrase "turtle neck" online, the whole experiment is compromised. Best to start thinking of another item altogether.
- fian 5y ago
  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.
jesseryoung 5y ago
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.
- beermonster 5y ago
  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_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita... [2] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542 https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542
  - samanator 5y ago
    Why is this downvoted? It provides useful information with sources.
- ir77 5y ago
  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.
pb060 5y ago
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!
1MachineElf 5y ago
When I moved into a house with someone who has a workshop, I started getting a lot of advertisements for tools.
jahewson 5y ago
Because you’re on the same wifi network behind a NAT and have the same public IP?
n00bdude 5y ago
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.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    No Apple Watch. Phone was just sitting in the room charging. Finished vacuuming and bam - Dyson Vacuum Ad
- n00bdude 5y ago
  Wow -2 downvotes for posting this really wow
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
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?
- wyager 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  Your friend mentioned the ad to you, so it kinda worked? It did find its targeted audience.
  - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
    I guess -it's all useless, expensive vitamins though.
awb 5y ago
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?
rsync 5y ago
"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 5y ago
  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.
  - dirkt 5y ago
    Which country is that? US? I am glad in my country we do not have eye-level facial recognition cameras (I'd assume that would be illegal), and I can and happily do pay with cash.
    - katmannthree 5y ago
      Yes, the US. Virtually every large chain is doing it, even in the relatively remote area I live in. There's really no such thing as privacy here, too much money to be made tracking and selling to people.
- deleted 5y ago
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- the_biot 5y ago
  Considering he doesn't use ad blockers, i.e. he sees ads at all, he may not be a data privacy expert. /s
- erhk 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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callesgg 5y ago
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.
titzer 5y ago
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.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    > 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.
strangattractor 5y ago
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:)
deleted 5y ago
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CalChris 5y ago
Correlation is causation.
intricatedetail 5y ago
This should be illegal. Why politicians don't stop this?
cupofcoffee 5y ago
Trivial solution: make a tool that pumps tons of fake data to the point where no algorithm can separate the signal from the noise.
decafninja 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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?
  - decafninja 5y ago
    Pretty sure we didn't.
sfblah 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
- aussieguy1234 5y ago
  for Android I use a little app called DNS66. This blocks most bad stuff, it sets up a virtual/loopback VPN on the device that I just leave running all the time.
jb1991 5y ago
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 5y ago
  They’re certainly not above it, but constant recording would destroy battery life and get noticed quickly.
  - jb1991 5y ago
    What's interesting is that we will get ads for things that sound the same as something we talked about, which further suggests the mic is on. Like a company with the same pronunciation as a different word altogether, and that being the only connection between us and the company -- we mention the other word, verbally, and the company's ads starting showing up that same day.
- cbo100 5y ago
  Yep this has happened to us too many times to be a coincidence. Sitting on the couch and mention I noticed some issues while doing gardening and the side fence might need replacing - next minute Facebook is advertising fencing companies to her. I never googled, she never googled it. Somehow it keeps happening.
spinach 5y ago
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.
gnicholas 5y ago
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.
jimmaswell 5y ago
Haven't studies found this kind of thing to be mostly the frequency illusion?
Fern_Blossom 5y ago
So, this is going to be slightly beyond me to accomplish. At least, I'm not really willing to apply the effort. But what if there was a service to pump out garbage data for these ad services to collect? Like, what if everyone used every toothpaste all the time (theoretically). Thus, marketers are flooded with bad leads. Enough to make a critical mass to stop relying on data collection tactics. To make sure this gets enough market usage, it would have to be free, thus the funding of such a project would be difficult. Perhaps a Wikipedia type of public funding rounds, maybe patreon and create merch. I don't know. I'm just interested in a way to dilute the data market and make it absolutely meaningless for anyone to buy. Hopefully, destroying the market. A handful of people doing a wee bit of ad blocking isn't working. Will this have 2nd and 3rd level repercussions? Absolutely. Will this hamper corporate surveillance on people? I think so. At least I think it'll be a better ride than the Gamestop market ride. Just a drunk idea. Throwing it out there. Maybe someone will think of something better off of this.
jerome-jh 5y ago
Location data is truly very powerful, this has been shown already. As an example: I live in a large apartements complex. I mostly always see the same people, because we have the same in/out hours and days. There are people I know who live here that I almost never bump into by chance, sometimes not even once in a year. This give an idea of how timestamped location data is personal and identifies you. This is quite impressive if you think about it. That's the reason why Google keeps pinging you if you change the location privacy settings on your Android phone.

371 points by deadcoder0904 5y ago

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!

Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
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.
lawn 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
prepend 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    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?
  - edejong 5y ago
    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.
  - rambambram 5y ago
    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.
    - dalmo3 5y ago
      Doesn't that mean ads have shaped your behaviour in a much deeper way than just nudging you to buy a thing or two?
maccard 5y ago
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"
reedf1 5y ago
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 5y ago
  [deleted]
- manmal 5y ago
  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.
  - andyana 5y ago
    Organic, in my opinion, is a marketing term for the most part.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    So maybe your purchase history is unaffected, which is a great thing I'd agree, but with ads, I worry about the psychological effect too. People can't really ignore manipulation, so I don't think it's plausible to say that how you _feel_ is unaffected by advertisements. I think the only way to remain impartial to it is to be never exposed the first place.
- fortran77 5y ago
  Exactly. The people here who believe they're too "smart" to be influenced are probably the biggest suckers!
  - npwr 5y ago
    I don't see any ads with ublock on my desktop and mobile browser. I believe the ads I don't see don't influence me. Can you believe that?
tzs 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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/standing_73.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-lab/publications/standi... Journal Page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14640747308400340 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464074730840034...
titzer 5y ago
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!

lawlorino 5y ago

An alternative and much more boring explanation for this and others' stories in the replies is confirmation bias.

jarenmf 5y ago

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.

rantwasp 5y ago
youtube is watching you. base on ip and the content consumed they guess (and augment that guess with what they know about your brother)
kzrdude 5y ago
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.

shoto_io 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Which in turn is a good thing, right? Because people seem to get pooled together and the ads aren't clever enough to distinguish.
    - politelemon 5y ago
      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.
      - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dotancohen 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

akeck 5y ago

A relative got immediately targeted by FB ads for a product we had just talked about on speakerphone.

paulcole 5y ago
What products have they said and then not seen ads for?
jonny_eh 5y ago
It's coincidence mixed with him talking about things that interest him, which are of course advertised to him.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  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.

melomal 5y ago

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.

jonny_eh 5y ago
Sounds like coincidence mixed with confirmation bias. The likelier explanation for stories like this.
- melomal 5y ago
  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 5y ago
>looking for holidays to book Well, I assume you weren't looking through an offline printed holiday guide of some sort :-)
- jacob019 5y ago
  This. We always get targeted youtube ads after googling things. Creepy AF.
  - gruez 5y ago

arthur_sav 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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.

Inhibit 5y ago

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.

foreigner 5y ago

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.

Ccecil 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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.

shoto_io 5y ago

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.

bemmu 5y ago

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.

shawnz 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I’ve been waiting for an ad for turtle necks for over a year doing this experiment. Maybe that’s too specific?
  - cvwright 5y ago
    Start having conversations about turtlenecks and see how long it takes for the ads to show up.
    - dorkwood 5y ago
      Now that he's written the phrase "turtle neck" online, the whole experiment is compromised. Best to start thinking of another item altogether.
fian 5y ago
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.

jesseryoung 5y ago

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.

beermonster 5y ago
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_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita... [2] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542 https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542
- samanator 5y ago
  Why is this downvoted? It provides useful information with sources.
ir77 5y ago
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.

pb060 5y ago

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!

1MachineElf 5y ago

When I moved into a house with someone who has a workshop, I started getting a lot of advertisements for tools.

jahewson 5y ago

Because you’re on the same wifi network behind a NAT and have the same public IP?

n00bdude 5y ago

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.

TchoBeer 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  No Apple Watch. Phone was just sitting in the room charging. Finished vacuuming and bam - Dyson Vacuum Ad
n00bdude 5y ago
Wow -2 downvotes for posting this really wow

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

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?

wyager 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.
diogenescynic 5y ago
Your friend mentioned the ad to you, so it kinda worked? It did find its targeted audience.
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  I guess -it's all useless, expensive vitamins though.

awb 5y ago

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?

rsync 5y ago

"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 5y ago
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.
- dirkt 5y ago
  Which country is that? US? I am glad in my country we do not have eye-level facial recognition cameras (I'd assume that would be illegal), and I can and happily do pay with cash.
  - katmannthree 5y ago
    Yes, the US. Virtually every large chain is doing it, even in the relatively remote area I live in. There's really no such thing as privacy here, too much money to be made tracking and selling to people.
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the_biot 5y ago
Considering he doesn't use ad blockers, i.e. he sees ads at all, he may not be a data privacy expert. /s
erhk 5y ago

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callesgg 5y ago

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.

titzer 5y ago

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.

CyberRabbi 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  > 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.

strangattractor 5y ago

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:)

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CalChris 5y ago

Correlation is causation.

intricatedetail 5y ago

This should be illegal. Why politicians don't stop this?

cupofcoffee 5y ago

Trivial solution: make a tool that pumps tons of fake data to the point where no algorithm can separate the signal from the noise.

decafninja 5y ago

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 5y ago
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?
- decafninja 5y ago
  Pretty sure we didn't.

sfblah 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
aussieguy1234 5y ago
for Android I use a little app called DNS66. This blocks most bad stuff, it sets up a virtual/loopback VPN on the device that I just leave running all the time.

jb1991 5y ago

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 5y ago
They’re certainly not above it, but constant recording would destroy battery life and get noticed quickly.
- jb1991 5y ago
  What's interesting is that we will get ads for things that sound the same as something we talked about, which further suggests the mic is on. Like a company with the same pronunciation as a different word altogether, and that being the only connection between us and the company -- we mention the other word, verbally, and the company's ads starting showing up that same day.
cbo100 5y ago
Yep this has happened to us too many times to be a coincidence. Sitting on the couch and mention I noticed some issues while doing gardening and the side fence might need replacing - next minute Facebook is advertising fencing companies to her. I never googled, she never googled it. Somehow it keeps happening.

spinach 5y ago

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.

gnicholas 5y ago

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.

jimmaswell 5y ago

Haven't studies found this kind of thing to be mostly the frequency illusion?

Fern_Blossom 5y ago

So, this is going to be slightly beyond me to accomplish. At least, I'm not really willing to apply the effort. But what if there was a service to pump out garbage data for these ad services to collect? Like, what if everyone used every toothpaste all the time (theoretically). Thus, marketers are flooded with bad leads. Enough to make a critical mass to stop relying on data collection tactics. To make sure this gets enough market usage, it would have to be free, thus the funding of such a project would be difficult. Perhaps a Wikipedia type of public funding rounds, maybe patreon and create merch. I don't know. I'm just interested in a way to dilute the data market and make it absolutely meaningless for anyone to buy. Hopefully, destroying the market. A handful of people doing a wee bit of ad blocking isn't working. Will this have 2nd and 3rd level repercussions? Absolutely. Will this hamper corporate surveillance on people? I think so. At least I think it'll be a better ride than the Gamestop market ride. Just a drunk idea. Throwing it out there. Maybe someone will think of something better off of this.

jerome-jh 5y ago

Location data is truly very powerful, this has been shown already. As an example: I live in a large apartements complex. I mostly always see the same people, because we have the same in/out hours and days. There are people I know who live here that I almost never bump into by chance, sometimes not even once in a year. This give an idea of how timestamped location data is personal and identifies you. This is quite impressive if you think about it. That's the reason why Google keeps pinging you if you change the location privacy settings on your Android phone.