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I think you partly may just be biased by happening to notice ads more if they fit the topic you sent to your wife or being lenient in deciding if ads meet the c

I think you partly may just be biased by happening to notice ads more if they fit the topic you sent to your wife or being lenient in deciding if ads meet the categorization. And if you dwell on an ad because it seems to match, you may get more similar ads. Here is how I think you could design a more robust (but less fun) experiment: - Come up with a bunch of topics, write them down on slips of paper, put the paper into a hat - Each Monday, draw three topics from the hat, send some WhatsApp messages about the first, Messenger messages about the second, and don’t discuss the third. Don’t put the topics back in the hat. - If you see any ads relating to one of the topics, screenshot them and save screenshots to eg your computer with a bit of the topic - Separately, record which topic went to which platform - After doing this for a while, go through the screenshots and (each of you and your wife or ideally other people) give a rating for how well the ad matches the topic. To avoid bias, you shouldn’t know which app saw the topic. - Now work out average ratings / the distribution across the three products (WhatsApp vs Messenger vs none) and compare

_8j50 4y ago
This is facebook. They've been caught recording people and selling that for advertising, they deny it because technically your audio is transcripted not recorded and they can send only some keywords back so whole conversations aren't sent back to them.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Source?
  - netsectoday 4y ago
    - nindalf 4y ago
      So if were walking past a playing blaring the piña colada song, I’d see ads for alcohol and umbrellas? If coworkers around me are talking about activities I’m not interested in, I’d see ads for those? They have far better information that shows I’m not interested in alcohol or extreme sports. Audio in the background is so low-signal that it isn’t worth showing ads based on it. Even just transcribing speech something accurately is not something that was possible until the last couple of years. Yet this conspiracy theory has been around for a decade or more.
    - thehappypm 4y ago
      This isn’t evidence. Even if Facebook was not listening to your conversations, there would be some rate in which you would just randomly be served an ad related to a topic you were discussing. There needs to be evidence that it is happening at a rate too high to be attributable to chance.
      - netsectoday 4y ago
        Sounds like a good way to engineer it... anything to improve the bottom line even if insanely-targeted ads only trickle out to users. How about limiting who sees this feature to also limit the risk of being detected? Maybe just do it once a year to everyone, or never to specific "tech-savvy" users that they have completely profiled.
    - procinct 4y ago
      Don’t iPhone have an indicator when the mic is recording? Also, this feels like it would be insanely easy to test by capturing the payloads sent to FB; you could even use something like Charles Proxy to do it. FB having access to microphone makes sense for plenty of other completely innocent reasons (for example, if you can record a video from inside the app). If this was actually true, I can’t help but feel that someone would have proven it technically by now instead of relying on these types of self experiment and anecdotes, especially given how commonly this is touted.
      - titaniczero 4y ago
        And don’t forget the battery. A mic recording 24/7 would drain the battery much faster and would not go unnoticed unless specialized hardware is used like the one for “hey siri” and “ok google”.
        netsectoday 4y ago
        Doesn't the Facebook app drain your battery?
        titaniczero 4y ago
        Try any voice recording app for a few hours, now use the facebook app for the same number of hours. The impact on battery life of a mic actively recording alone is very noticeable, so noticeable that your phone has a special chip just to recognize patterns similar to “hey siri”.
        netsectoday 4y ago
        titaniczero 4y ago
        > This way too I can troll people on the internet when they suspect this is happening and I can say "bUt ThE bAtTeRy LiFe!" to defend Meta: my corporate overlord business daddy. Please, stop with the sarcasm. Okey, let’s say they manage to record us without a huge impact on our battery life. Now, how do you send these recordings or even the extracted keywords from a popular app, a client installed on devices controlled by the users and susceptible to reverse engineering and network traffic analysis without anyone noticing it? It’s just too much risk and they don’t even need it, see my relevant reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32950204#32953216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32950204#32953216.
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      >Zero coincidence Yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that your wife is talking about X and is recognised by Facebook to be in a group of people that are interested in X.
    - ac2u 4y ago
      It's ironic that you're asserting this by replying to a parent message which explains why this probably isn't the case.
  - criddell 4y ago
    We did an experiment. We talked about how hard it is to find highlighter yellow nail polish. Nobody in the house is a purchaser of nail polish nor did we do any searches for highlighter or yellow or nail or polish. A day or two later my wife got an Instagram ad for highlighter yellow nail polish. It could have been a coincidence or maybe they were listening. Or maybe some combination of things we did previously led naturally to thinking about that yellow nail polish. I'm thinking about something like the trick where you ask somebody a bunch of addition problems that have 14 as the answer (what's 10+4? 2+12? 3+9? etc...) then ask them to name a vegetable and they will almost always say carrot.
    - paulrouget 4y ago
      Am I missing something? Why carrot?
      - muzani 4y ago
        It's an association thing. I thought carrot too. Maybe it's because of the tedious nature of processing. Maybe it's because the orange bar at the top of the screen makes me think carrot.
      - criddell 4y ago
        I’ve always assumed it’s because of the association of 14 with 14 carat gold.
        gusgus01 4y ago
        Interestingly, I've always seen it as any number of quick math problems, not just ones that equal 14, and it consistently works too.
        criddell 4y ago
        12 year old me was not much of a scientist. I don't think I ever tried any number other than 14...
    - 4y ago
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Ah yes, a bunch of anecdotes in reply.
    - netsectoday 4y ago
      - thehappypm 4y ago
        you’d think that a educated group like this would understand that anecdotes are not sufficient evidence for something like this.
        netsectoday 4y ago
        This is a message board about tech... comments aren't welcome anymore - we need evidence to participate? I think it's interesting when a bunch of people chime in and say "Hey, yeah, I had some crazy thing happen to me, I'm in tech and understand how this stuff works, and there's a very small to zero chance this happened through some other parallel construction by the tech company, they just straight up listened to my conversation and showed me an ad". This is what kicks off a handful of you to go packet sniffing and write up a blog post looking for this behavior. So yes, evidence is welcome but it doesn't seem like we are quite there yet.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        In general I agree, but I think when you are being explicitly asked for a "source" in response to an allegation that it is settled that FB has been "caught recording people," I would prefer to not have anecdotes in reply.
        netsectoday 4y ago
        I'd prefer to say whatever I want. Must have filed it in the wrong place.
- _8j50 4y ago
  Plenty of research and news stories about this if you care to search. The speculative part of my comment is about the transcription which I'm speculating because of their fervent denials despite evidence which technically their wording in their denial statements is correct. If I had to guess, your whatsapp messages are e2e secured but keywords are sent to facebook when they match some condition. So if you message "happy birthday" to someone, they won't see that but the fact that the keyword "birthday" was found even if the word isn't included is sent to fb. That way they can say they're not snooping your messages.
- neodypsis 4y ago
  Would they argue that the message goes first into a neural network that outputs potential product labels based on the message and that it all happens client-side? That's the only way I see it possible for them not to violate the E2EE.
nindalf 4y ago
There will be some bias in what they choose to screenshot right? Meaning, the unrelated topic might show up in the feed but they don’t screenshot it because it doesn’t fit the narrative? Also, what we’re interested is if the text changed what was shown. If I saw ads for X last week but didn’t notice them, then spoke to a friend and noticed them and took a screenshot, it would appear to confirm the theory. Even though I was always seeing ads for X. Ultimately, I don’t think people who are convinced of this theory will change their minds so it’s a moot point.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Yeah, that’s the biggest flaw in the experiment I proposed, I think. This is the reason I try to have the hopefully independent grading of ad-topic-relevancy blinded to which system the topic was communicated over. It may be that one sees many vaguely related ads for the WhatsApp topic due to some selection bias but a similar number of actually related ads.
rakoo 4y ago
A simpler protocol to realize that the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is probably what's happening: - pick said topic, something you never cared about before, talk about it but don't write any messages containing it; - for 1 month record every ad you see about it; - send a message about the topic; - for another month, record every ad you see about it Comparing the number of occurrences will tell you what is happening.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  You're saying to record ads you see about it on TV or something? (Just to eliminate the "My computer is secretly recording me" angle)
  - rakoo 4y ago
    I'm talking about every occurrence that might be pushed, so it's the TV ads, webradio ads, search suggestions, ...
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    The problem is, your smart TV could be spying you too, if it's capable of voice commands or videoconference. If you discuss sex toys near it, at least some related keywords could make their way to targeted advertising. My wife and I routinely use ad blockers, private browser windows, browser profiles, and try to use as little ad-supported products as possible. This doesn't stop targeted advertising, I guess because most devices we use connect through the same IP. A couple of days after she starts looking up a city we want to travel to, I'll start receiving ads from airline companies or travel agencies, and even tours/cruises to said city/region. Fighting tracking and spyware is nearly a lost cause unless you become a digital Amish.
    - stvswn 4y ago
      Smart TVs in general use IP address to try target devices across households, which is against the privacy policies of a lot of ad tech providers because IPs are not redactable/resettable by an end-user. The best way for small ad tech providers to compete with "big tech" has been to cross lines that the bigger companies won't cross, this is an example for why there are a lot of profitable ad tech companies in the connected TV / video ads space. Even if you use a VPN, the TV itself likely has a unique ID for ads, so someone just needs to see one request with both the true IP and the unique device ID and then remember that for the future. It's all very shady. TVs are very far behind the level of user control that phones and browsers provide because there's less scrutiny and its more fragmented across manufacturers (all of which want to get in on ad tech). You can usually find some opt-out of the identifiers if you dig deep enough into the menus, because multiple laws and regulations require them.
muzani 4y ago
I don't think it can be observed because it's likely a bug. It freaks users out. People uninstall the app and start threads like this. It's sort of like getting mugged once and then setting up a camera in a bunch of alleys to prove that muggers exist. You can even set up a camera of yourself running into dark alleys every night, but the odds of reproducing a mugging is still extremely low. There's a certain kind of precision that convinces me it's real though. Precision is common. I look at a book on Amazon, and a FB ad for that book appears. But I get rejected for a loan via WhatsApp and then used car ads appear for that model of car that I applied a loan for? That's a bit on the nose.
- boltzmann-brain 4y ago
  > the odds of reproducing a mugging is still extremely low I did that and I got a mugging on camera. The attacker was convicted.
- dahdum 4y ago
  > But I get rejected for a loan via WhatsApp and then used car ads appear for that model of car that I applied a loan for? That's a bit on the nose. Aside from random coincidence, I could see this happening if you provided your personal information (especially email) for the loan application. It could have been shared to multiple underlying lenders alongside a data vendor who ultimately provided interest targeting (which can include car models) to an ad network. Getting an ad for that specific model could also have been due to other online activity, such as checking the KBB.
  - muzani 4y ago
    Ah thanks, I didn't know that was possible. It did have email. If it's integrated into such activities, it might actually be a good explanation for all the other similar scenarios blamed on WhatsApp.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > Getting an ad for that specific model could also have been due to other online activity, such as checking the KBB I suspect op may have researched the car model and got retargeted: some ad networks keep track of specific products you've shown interest in (not generic interest-areas like Google ads) and track you via a cookie. You may be visiting a completely different site that uses the same network, and get ads on the exact product you've spent minutes reading about.
chillacy 4y ago
You can’t come up with the topics yourself either, because the topics you will think up are different based on your demographic / type of person you are, and ad networks basically try to guess that.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  The idea is that you may discover the topics you don’t talk about that week still come up as much as those you do.
- JoshuaDavid 4y ago
  You can if you first come up with a list of topics, and then once you have that list, randomly assign each of those topics to one of the three categories.
RC_ITR 4y ago
These kind of stories are always fun to analyze using the Socratic method. -How did you learn about the product? -Have you ever searched for it? -Did a friend of yours tell you about it? Do you think they searched for it? -Are a lot of ads for it playing on TV channels you like? Could instagram know you like those TV channels? -Is it something your neighbors got? Do you think there has been a spike in shipments of this product to your neighbors? Eventually people start to “get” that scanning the text of messages is way more helpful for humans than it is for computers. They’ve got other data they can use.
- hbn 4y ago
  I also have a theory that sometimes when people say "we were talking about <product> and I never even typed it into my phone or anything, and suddenly I started seeing ads for it the next day!" that the person in the story may not have looked up <product>, but someone else in the conversation might have Googled it or browsed an Amazon listing or something and they have some kind of connection in their ad profiles whether it be that they know these 2 people interact a lot, they're in the same geolocation, same wifi network/IP address, etc. I'm just not convinced of the always on microphones in phones listening for and processing every single thing considering how much battery drain that would cause, whether the processing is done on device or they're sending all that data to a server to be processed.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > I'm just not convinced of the always on microphones in phones listening for and processing every single thing considering how much battery drain that would cause, We know our phones commonly listen for "smart assistant" prompts and audio beacons (https://www.nanalyze.com/2017/05/audio-beacons-monitor-smartphone/ https://www.nanalyze.com/2017/05/audio-beacons-monitor-smart...), so they don't seem to have any trouble abusing the mic access. Honestly without a whistleblower, there's little hope of really understanding how much data a company collects and what they use it for. At least sometimes we can see it in their own marketing materials. For example, https://advertising.roku.com/resources/blog/insights-analysis/acr-the-future-of-tv-and-audience-data https://advertising.roku.com/resources/blog/insights-analysi... tells us: "Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching." None of the people I know who use those devices knew that was happening, but the info was out there at least. When so many people are watching everything you see and do and say who can ever know what every company is doing or what the source of any one ad is?
vineyardmike 4y ago
An important thing you’re missing is the control. You should record every ad. You need to know if you got 3 topics of ads every day and 1/3 of them are related to that secret topic, OR if you get 300 topics every day and 1/300 are related to that secret topic. If it’s the former, it’s suspicious, if it’s the latter, it’s way less suspicious.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  The control is the topic you pick that you don’t discuss on WhatsApp or messenger. The idea is random differences between topics should average out over many trials.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    I still think it’s important to consider the volume of topics that show up that aren’t being explicitly looked for. I’ve gotten Instagram ads for ketamine and I absolutely am not discussing or searching for it. I probably wouldn’t even notice a random topic if it’s not so absurd. I’m sure there’s tons of topics I don’t even realize I see.
    - dan-robertson 4y ago
      The reason for the control I suggested is to try to counteract the bias people have towards noticing things they recently thought about. I think the question of what adverts people are shown in general is interesting but quite separate.
uup 4y ago
I call this the gaslighting explanation: “no, it definitely wasn’t the messaging product owned by an advertising behemoth. You must have searched for it somewhere else.” Obviously the OP remembers where they’ve seen the product. If they has seen the product elsewhere, they wouldn’t have started this thread!

_8j50 4y ago

This is facebook. They've been caught recording people and selling that for advertising, they deny it because technically your audio is transcripted not recorded and they can send only some keywords back so whole conversations aren't sent back to them.

thehappypm 4y ago
Source?
- netsectoday 4y ago
  - nindalf 4y ago
    So if were walking past a playing blaring the piña colada song, I’d see ads for alcohol and umbrellas? If coworkers around me are talking about activities I’m not interested in, I’d see ads for those? They have far better information that shows I’m not interested in alcohol or extreme sports. Audio in the background is so low-signal that it isn’t worth showing ads based on it. Even just transcribing speech something accurately is not something that was possible until the last couple of years. Yet this conspiracy theory has been around for a decade or more.
  - thehappypm 4y ago
    This isn’t evidence. Even if Facebook was not listening to your conversations, there would be some rate in which you would just randomly be served an ad related to a topic you were discussing. There needs to be evidence that it is happening at a rate too high to be attributable to chance.
    - netsectoday 4y ago
      Sounds like a good way to engineer it... anything to improve the bottom line even if insanely-targeted ads only trickle out to users. How about limiting who sees this feature to also limit the risk of being detected? Maybe just do it once a year to everyone, or never to specific "tech-savvy" users that they have completely profiled.
  - procinct 4y ago
    Don’t iPhone have an indicator when the mic is recording? Also, this feels like it would be insanely easy to test by capturing the payloads sent to FB; you could even use something like Charles Proxy to do it. FB having access to microphone makes sense for plenty of other completely innocent reasons (for example, if you can record a video from inside the app). If this was actually true, I can’t help but feel that someone would have proven it technically by now instead of relying on these types of self experiment and anecdotes, especially given how commonly this is touted.
    - titaniczero 4y ago
      And don’t forget the battery. A mic recording 24/7 would drain the battery much faster and would not go unnoticed unless specialized hardware is used like the one for “hey siri” and “ok google”.
      - netsectoday 4y ago
        Doesn't the Facebook app drain your battery?
        titaniczero 4y ago
        Try any voice recording app for a few hours, now use the facebook app for the same number of hours. The impact on battery life of a mic actively recording alone is very noticeable, so noticeable that your phone has a special chip just to recognize patterns similar to “hey siri”.
        netsectoday 4y ago
        titaniczero 4y ago
        > This way too I can troll people on the internet when they suspect this is happening and I can say "bUt ThE bAtTeRy LiFe!" to defend Meta: my corporate overlord business daddy. Please, stop with the sarcasm. Okey, let’s say they manage to record us without a huge impact on our battery life. Now, how do you send these recordings or even the extracted keywords from a popular app, a client installed on devices controlled by the users and susceptible to reverse engineering and network traffic analysis without anyone noticing it? It’s just too much risk and they don’t even need it, see my relevant reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32950204#32953216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32950204#32953216.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    >Zero coincidence Yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that your wife is talking about X and is recognised by Facebook to be in a group of people that are interested in X.
  - ac2u 4y ago
    It's ironic that you're asserting this by replying to a parent message which explains why this probably isn't the case.
- criddell 4y ago
  We did an experiment. We talked about how hard it is to find highlighter yellow nail polish. Nobody in the house is a purchaser of nail polish nor did we do any searches for highlighter or yellow or nail or polish. A day or two later my wife got an Instagram ad for highlighter yellow nail polish. It could have been a coincidence or maybe they were listening. Or maybe some combination of things we did previously led naturally to thinking about that yellow nail polish. I'm thinking about something like the trick where you ask somebody a bunch of addition problems that have 14 as the answer (what's 10+4? 2+12? 3+9? etc...) then ask them to name a vegetable and they will almost always say carrot.
  - paulrouget 4y ago
    Am I missing something? Why carrot?
    - muzani 4y ago
      It's an association thing. I thought carrot too. Maybe it's because of the tedious nature of processing. Maybe it's because the orange bar at the top of the screen makes me think carrot.
    - criddell 4y ago
      I’ve always assumed it’s because of the association of 14 with 14 carat gold.
      - gusgus01 4y ago
        Interestingly, I've always seen it as any number of quick math problems, not just ones that equal 14, and it consistently works too.
        criddell 4y ago
        12 year old me was not much of a scientist. I don't think I ever tried any number other than 14...
  - 4y ago
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Ah yes, a bunch of anecdotes in reply.
  - netsectoday 4y ago
    - thehappypm 4y ago
      you’d think that a educated group like this would understand that anecdotes are not sufficient evidence for something like this.
      - netsectoday 4y ago
        This is a message board about tech... comments aren't welcome anymore - we need evidence to participate? I think it's interesting when a bunch of people chime in and say "Hey, yeah, I had some crazy thing happen to me, I'm in tech and understand how this stuff works, and there's a very small to zero chance this happened through some other parallel construction by the tech company, they just straight up listened to my conversation and showed me an ad". This is what kicks off a handful of you to go packet sniffing and write up a blog post looking for this behavior. So yes, evidence is welcome but it doesn't seem like we are quite there yet.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
        In general I agree, but I think when you are being explicitly asked for a "source" in response to an allegation that it is settled that FB has been "caught recording people," I would prefer to not have anecdotes in reply.
        netsectoday 4y ago
        I'd prefer to say whatever I want. Must have filed it in the wrong place.
_8j50 4y ago
Plenty of research and news stories about this if you care to search. The speculative part of my comment is about the transcription which I'm speculating because of their fervent denials despite evidence which technically their wording in their denial statements is correct. If I had to guess, your whatsapp messages are e2e secured but keywords are sent to facebook when they match some condition. So if you message "happy birthday" to someone, they won't see that but the fact that the keyword "birthday" was found even if the word isn't included is sent to fb. That way they can say they're not snooping your messages.
neodypsis 4y ago
Would they argue that the message goes first into a neural network that outputs potential product labels based on the message and that it all happens client-side? That's the only way I see it possible for them not to violate the E2EE.

nindalf 4y ago

There will be some bias in what they choose to screenshot right? Meaning, the unrelated topic might show up in the feed but they don’t screenshot it because it doesn’t fit the narrative? Also, what we’re interested is if the text changed what was shown. If I saw ads for X last week but didn’t notice them, then spoke to a friend and noticed them and took a screenshot, it would appear to confirm the theory. Even though I was always seeing ads for X. Ultimately, I don’t think people who are convinced of this theory will change their minds so it’s a moot point.

dan-robertson 4y ago
Yeah, that’s the biggest flaw in the experiment I proposed, I think. This is the reason I try to have the hopefully independent grading of ad-topic-relevancy blinded to which system the topic was communicated over. It may be that one sees many vaguely related ads for the WhatsApp topic due to some selection bias but a similar number of actually related ads.

rakoo 4y ago

A simpler protocol to realize that the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is probably what's happening: - pick said topic, something you never cared about before, talk about it but don't write any messages containing it; - for 1 month record every ad you see about it; - send a message about the topic; - for another month, record every ad you see about it Comparing the number of occurrences will tell you what is happening.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
You're saying to record ads you see about it on TV or something? (Just to eliminate the "My computer is secretly recording me" angle)
- rakoo 4y ago
  I'm talking about every occurrence that might be pushed, so it's the TV ads, webradio ads, search suggestions, ...
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  The problem is, your smart TV could be spying you too, if it's capable of voice commands or videoconference. If you discuss sex toys near it, at least some related keywords could make their way to targeted advertising. My wife and I routinely use ad blockers, private browser windows, browser profiles, and try to use as little ad-supported products as possible. This doesn't stop targeted advertising, I guess because most devices we use connect through the same IP. A couple of days after she starts looking up a city we want to travel to, I'll start receiving ads from airline companies or travel agencies, and even tours/cruises to said city/region. Fighting tracking and spyware is nearly a lost cause unless you become a digital Amish.
  - stvswn 4y ago
    Smart TVs in general use IP address to try target devices across households, which is against the privacy policies of a lot of ad tech providers because IPs are not redactable/resettable by an end-user. The best way for small ad tech providers to compete with "big tech" has been to cross lines that the bigger companies won't cross, this is an example for why there are a lot of profitable ad tech companies in the connected TV / video ads space. Even if you use a VPN, the TV itself likely has a unique ID for ads, so someone just needs to see one request with both the true IP and the unique device ID and then remember that for the future. It's all very shady. TVs are very far behind the level of user control that phones and browsers provide because there's less scrutiny and its more fragmented across manufacturers (all of which want to get in on ad tech). You can usually find some opt-out of the identifiers if you dig deep enough into the menus, because multiple laws and regulations require them.

muzani 4y ago

I don't think it can be observed because it's likely a bug. It freaks users out. People uninstall the app and start threads like this. It's sort of like getting mugged once and then setting up a camera in a bunch of alleys to prove that muggers exist. You can even set up a camera of yourself running into dark alleys every night, but the odds of reproducing a mugging is still extremely low. There's a certain kind of precision that convinces me it's real though. Precision is common. I look at a book on Amazon, and a FB ad for that book appears. But I get rejected for a loan via WhatsApp and then used car ads appear for that model of car that I applied a loan for? That's a bit on the nose.

boltzmann-brain 4y ago
> the odds of reproducing a mugging is still extremely low I did that and I got a mugging on camera. The attacker was convicted.
dahdum 4y ago
> But I get rejected for a loan via WhatsApp and then used car ads appear for that model of car that I applied a loan for? That's a bit on the nose. Aside from random coincidence, I could see this happening if you provided your personal information (especially email) for the loan application. It could have been shared to multiple underlying lenders alongside a data vendor who ultimately provided interest targeting (which can include car models) to an ad network. Getting an ad for that specific model could also have been due to other online activity, such as checking the KBB.
- muzani 4y ago
  Ah thanks, I didn't know that was possible. It did have email. If it's integrated into such activities, it might actually be a good explanation for all the other similar scenarios blamed on WhatsApp.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > Getting an ad for that specific model could also have been due to other online activity, such as checking the KBB I suspect op may have researched the car model and got retargeted: some ad networks keep track of specific products you've shown interest in (not generic interest-areas like Google ads) and track you via a cookie. You may be visiting a completely different site that uses the same network, and get ads on the exact product you've spent minutes reading about.

chillacy 4y ago

You can’t come up with the topics yourself either, because the topics you will think up are different based on your demographic / type of person you are, and ad networks basically try to guess that.

dan-robertson 4y ago
The idea is that you may discover the topics you don’t talk about that week still come up as much as those you do.
JoshuaDavid 4y ago
You can if you first come up with a list of topics, and then once you have that list, randomly assign each of those topics to one of the three categories.

RC_ITR 4y ago

These kind of stories are always fun to analyze using the Socratic method. -How did you learn about the product? -Have you ever searched for it? -Did a friend of yours tell you about it? Do you think they searched for it? -Are a lot of ads for it playing on TV channels you like? Could instagram know you like those TV channels? -Is it something your neighbors got? Do you think there has been a spike in shipments of this product to your neighbors? Eventually people start to “get” that scanning the text of messages is way more helpful for humans than it is for computers. They’ve got other data they can use.

hbn 4y ago
I also have a theory that sometimes when people say "we were talking about <product> and I never even typed it into my phone or anything, and suddenly I started seeing ads for it the next day!" that the person in the story may not have looked up <product>, but someone else in the conversation might have Googled it or browsed an Amazon listing or something and they have some kind of connection in their ad profiles whether it be that they know these 2 people interact a lot, they're in the same geolocation, same wifi network/IP address, etc. I'm just not convinced of the always on microphones in phones listening for and processing every single thing considering how much battery drain that would cause, whether the processing is done on device or they're sending all that data to a server to be processed.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > I'm just not convinced of the always on microphones in phones listening for and processing every single thing considering how much battery drain that would cause, We know our phones commonly listen for "smart assistant" prompts and audio beacons (https://www.nanalyze.com/2017/05/audio-beacons-monitor-smartphone/ https://www.nanalyze.com/2017/05/audio-beacons-monitor-smart...), so they don't seem to have any trouble abusing the mic access. Honestly without a whistleblower, there's little hope of really understanding how much data a company collects and what they use it for. At least sometimes we can see it in their own marketing materials. For example, https://advertising.roku.com/resources/blog/insights-analysis/acr-the-future-of-tv-and-audience-data https://advertising.roku.com/resources/blog/insights-analysi... tells us: "Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching." None of the people I know who use those devices knew that was happening, but the info was out there at least. When so many people are watching everything you see and do and say who can ever know what every company is doing or what the source of any one ad is?

vineyardmike 4y ago

An important thing you’re missing is the control. You should record every ad. You need to know if you got 3 topics of ads every day and 1/3 of them are related to that secret topic, OR if you get 300 topics every day and 1/300 are related to that secret topic. If it’s the former, it’s suspicious, if it’s the latter, it’s way less suspicious.

dan-robertson 4y ago
The control is the topic you pick that you don’t discuss on WhatsApp or messenger. The idea is random differences between topics should average out over many trials.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  I still think it’s important to consider the volume of topics that show up that aren’t being explicitly looked for. I’ve gotten Instagram ads for ketamine and I absolutely am not discussing or searching for it. I probably wouldn’t even notice a random topic if it’s not so absurd. I’m sure there’s tons of topics I don’t even realize I see.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    The reason for the control I suggested is to try to counteract the bias people have towards noticing things they recently thought about. I think the question of what adverts people are shown in general is interesting but quite separate.

uup 4y ago

I call this the gaslighting explanation: “no, it definitely wasn’t the messaging product owned by an advertising behemoth. You must have searched for it somewhere else.” Obviously the OP remembers where they’ve seen the product. If they has seen the product elsewhere, they wouldn’t have started this thread!