Digital Ads Are Starting To Feel Psychic (theoutline.com) 182
It seems like everyone these days has had a paranoiac moment where a website advertises something to you that you recently purchased or was gifted without a digital trail. According to a new website called New Organs, which collects first-hand accounts of these moments, "the feeling of being listened to is among the most common experiences, along with seeing the same ads on different websites, and being tracked via geo-location," reports The Outline. The website was created by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, two Brooklyn-based artists whose work explores the intersections of technology and society. From the report: "We are stuck in this 20th century idea of spying, of wiretapping and hidden microphones," said Brain. "But really there is this whole new sensory apparatus, a complicated entanglement of online trackers and algorithms that are watching over us." It is this new sensory apparatus that Brain and Lavigne metaphorically refer to as "new organs," as if the online surveillance framework used by social media platforms like Facebook has somehow transfigured into a semi-living organism. "These new organs don't actually need to listen to your voice to know that you like Japanese knives," Lavigne told me. "They actually have ways of coming to know things about you that we don't fully understand yet." In other words, these new methods of data collection have become so uncannily accurate in their knowledge of you as to occasionally feel indistinguishable from actual ears listening in on and understanding intimate conversations.
There are a few things that we do already know about these new "organs" of data processing, as defined by Brain and Lavigne. We know, for instance, that they have an insatiable appetite for personal data. They gather this by first tracking online activity, which is enough to tell them what people like, what they search for, what they listen to, what they read, where they're walking for dinner, and also, worryingly, who their friends are and what they like, read, purchase -- data that is gathered without their awareness. But, then, the organs also gather information purchased from commercial data brokers about people's offline lives, like how many credit cards they own, what their income is, and what they purchase when they go grocery shopping. And all of this information is triangulated with friends' data, because if they know what those dear to you are buying -- a Japanese knife, for instance -- there is a good chance that that person will be interested in that very same thing. The new organs process this enormous amount of information to break you down into categories, which are sometimes innocuous like, "Listens to Spotify" or "Trendy Moms," but can also be more sensitive, identifying ethnicity and religious affiliation, or invasively personal, like "Lives away from family." More than this, the new organs are being integrated with increasingly sophisticated algorithms, so they can generate predictive portraits of you, which they then sell to advertisers who can target products that you don't even know you want yet.
There are a few things that we do already know about these new "organs" of data processing, as defined by Brain and Lavigne. We know, for instance, that they have an insatiable appetite for personal data. They gather this by first tracking online activity, which is enough to tell them what people like, what they search for, what they listen to, what they read, where they're walking for dinner, and also, worryingly, who their friends are and what they like, read, purchase -- data that is gathered without their awareness. But, then, the organs also gather information purchased from commercial data brokers about people's offline lives, like how many credit cards they own, what their income is, and what they purchase when they go grocery shopping. And all of this information is triangulated with friends' data, because if they know what those dear to you are buying -- a Japanese knife, for instance -- there is a good chance that that person will be interested in that very same thing. The new organs process this enormous amount of information to break you down into categories, which are sometimes innocuous like, "Listens to Spotify" or "Trendy Moms," but can also be more sensitive, identifying ethnicity and religious affiliation, or invasively personal, like "Lives away from family." More than this, the new organs are being integrated with increasingly sophisticated algorithms, so they can generate predictive portraits of you, which they then sell to advertisers who can target products that you don't even know you want yet.
I use NoScript (Score:3, Insightful)
And don't have this problem.
Or block google analytics. (Score:4, Informative)
Google Analytics is what makes things look "psychic".
I was wondering why my iPad, which doesn't have any blockers, always shows ads for the last things I shopped for from companies I shopped at.
Common denominator that made the ads look "psychic"?
Google Analytics.
Ghostery and uBlock are pretty good.
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Yep. Just block google analytics in your hosts (or wherever). Clear out your cookies, 90% of tracking will be gone.
Anybody who isn't doing this but still comes on here and complains about "privacy" is an idiot.
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Sometimes I unblock ads, or use an unprotected browser for particular sites. Ie, at work they're highly in love with Microsoft and Cloud based solutions and everything, from HR to corporate announcements to training. So nothing works with them if you have any sort of scripting protection, even protection against cross-site scripting attacks will break all of this stuff. So I set up a second browser that has no adblock or noscript or even popup blocking.
Now I tried this at home, mostly because I was havin
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More and more sites friendly ask you to disable your ad-blocker because it is their only way of funding.
I usually send them an angry message explaining why I block ads, I think such sites are complicit to spying on my and putting my computer security at risk.
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It seems just stupid to start advertising something I just bought. Why would I go buy another so soon? Oh, I just bought a new car, so why are you trying to sell me a second new car? Why do they think I need a second baby crib as a backup?
Google analytics, and anything with the word "analytics" in the URL gets blocked by me. These tend to relatively safe, most web sites work just find without enabling those. The few that don't work I don't need to visit.
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It seems just stupid to start advertising something I just bought. Why would I go buy another so soon?
Asked the same from a friend that is in the corporate social media business. What you are seeing is the first layer and still on your computer. Most people spend several days shopping for items on the internet and the keeping sites they have visited in mind boosts the probability that they'll buy that product. That is just your webpage picking up and displaying products from cookies on your computer from participating companies. No server is telling it to give you those ads. Sure, it seems stupid when you s
Re:I use NoScript (Score:4, Informative)
Or you can use the the hosts file available at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho... [mvps.org] It's a little bulky at 470K bytes or so, and I haven't the slightest idea where Windows hides the hosts file nowadays (Unixen put it where they always have at /etc/hosts) But it certainly does work for linux.
If and when web advertisers clean up their act and quit trying to play games with me and MY computer, I'll be more than happy to remove my hosts file and display their ads (if they will kindly serve them promptly and keep the number and bandwidth within reason. And as long as they don't even think about including audio). .However, I imagine that in practice, I'll simply skip past their ads just like I do with magazine and newspaper ads.
Re:I use NoScript (Score:4, Informative)
Usually C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
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It's about the searching, not the storing (Score:4, Informative)
It's not about storage space, in this case. It's about searching through 20,000 lines several times each time you load a page. Suppose a page calls resources from five different domains. The system then has to go through those 20,000 lines five times before it can start loading the page.
With that many entries, it's about time to instead run named in a caching configuration (the default for some distributions), except add the blacklisted entries. Alternatively, put the blacklist in a browser extension so it never even asks the system to look up the name, and then try to connect to 127.0.0.2 or whatever you point it at.
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It's not about storage space, in this case. It's about searching through 20,000 lines several times each time you load a page.
Is the implementation really this stupid? Why doesn't it hash it on the first access? Even just sorting it would reduce subsequent searches to log-log interpolative searches.
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On Linux and Windows the hosts file is parsed and lookups are very fast, as you would expect. In fact the extra time taken for the lookup is more than offset by the download and image decoding time savings anyway.
If it really bothers you then you can set up a PiHole, a Raspberry Pi that provides DNS with ad filtering. Then all the work is outsourced to a dedicated low power box.
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It's not about storage space, in this case. It's about searching through 20,000 lines several times each time you load a page.
Complete rubbish.
Do you know how SLOW a real DNS lookup is? That 20,000 line text file is acting like a local cache. Given that almost every page out there will hit a couple of addresses in that file then it will speed things up, not slow them down.
PS: Your OS probably has a secondary DNS cache, because real DNS lookups are SLOW (did I mention that?).
That's not the comparison being made (Score:2)
The comparison GP made was between a hosts file that's too long and one that's right-sized, containing the names that you'll actually encounter, with some frequency. A smaller list can be searched faster than a larger list.
It's the same as any caching scenario - you want the cache to be just big enough to hold the frequently accessed items. Too large makes the cache unnecessarily slow, too small means some frequently-used items aren't in it. There is an optimum size which is neither too small nor too large.
Re: It's about the searching, not the storing (Score:4, Informative)
Er, his 'software' is an app that downloads a list from multiple sources, sorts and merges and spits out a host file.
Or so I'm told. By a friend.
It also has the capacity to add your 'favourites' to the beginning so that they are found more quickly.
All the increases in performance that he claims are based on making a lookup from a host file vs making a DNS request, or by comparing resource usage from a host-only solution vs a mix of browser extensions and/or AV.
His claims hinge on some very specific comparisons with shifting goalposts. A lookup from a host file is milliseconds faster than querying DNS, but the savings you make are swamped by the minutes you need to spend tending the host file each time you browse - opening his app, downloading, sorting, merging, writing etc. Using hosts alone uses considerably less resources than using browser extensions and or antivirus products, but a host-only solution isn't recommended by anyone - even he won't make that claim any more.
He posts some comparisons of browsers using (IIRC AdBlock) vs not. It's a bit dated, but it's of the order of low triple digits of MB. When most machines, these days, are running with GBs of RAM, a couple of hundred MBs is single digit percentage of system resources at maximum.
The entire point of computing resources is to use CPU, RAM and disk to perform tasks that would otherwise have to be performed by me. Using RAM to run a browser app to make administering a blacklist is exactly what I want to spend resources on. Saving those resources by increasing manual intervention is losing sight of why those resources are useful.
If you are on a system that's constrained in some fashion, then perhaps a lower level and lower resource solution like using the host file makes sense. It's hard to to find real world cases. If the resources are constrained enough, why is it being used for general browsing, and if it is being used for general browsing, why not look at blocking at the router/firewall than on the device? For most people it's a false economy. As a solution, blocking based on a host file was more useful when people had a single internet connected device that was a lot less powerful than today.
Using a host file is a blacklist. From a security perspective, a black list is of the form 'allow all and block [list]'. This is inefficient and ineffective. You are better from an efficiency and effectiveness to whitelist - 'allow none except [list]'.
You mention uBlock, have you taken a look at uMatrix? By the same author, it has a fairly intuitive interface that lets you block/allow by site and by resource requested (script, css, image, etc.). You get to choose what, apart from the domain and child domains that you visit are allowed to be called. That can either be a temporary permission, or saved as a rule. No association with the maker - I've used and like uBlock but have mostly moved to uMatrix.
Re:I use cash (Score:4, Informative)
I use cash for anything up into the $200-$300 range, maybe higher than that if I plan ahead. That way they don't get any tracking information from me. I recently had to break down and order a dryer door switch on-line after not being able to find it locally. After that I kept getting advertisements for dry door switches. How many of them do they think I need?
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Ack! You've got me figured out! I am a bit of a hermit, I'm retired and single living in a 3 bedroom house with 2 cats. I do live within my means but I'm not off the grid (Why would I need a dryer switch if I was off the grid? I'd be hanging my clothes out to dry.)
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Same - Ghostery.
It's a shame that ghostery have been working hard at completely fucking up the interface, you used to be able to open settings in a tab, now settings is restricted to a small box, great fun when you're trying to look at hundreds of lines.
I wish developers would put usability before whatever the fuck design thing they're following. They've gone down the route of hey, lets replace all the meaningful words with lots of confusing icons that do fuck-knows-what. And top top it off I have no fuckin
Re: I use NoScript (Score:2)
I wouldn't know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Where are these internet ads?? (I use uBlock origin personally, no ties).
The first late-night, auto-playing, pants staining ad that I ran into sometime around 1999 was the first and last. It's been open warfare since then, and the malware spreading ads that have popped up in the last 5 years or so have just reinforced my position.
I don't really see ads. If someone does and has some issue with them, that's their problem. It's a choice on their part, knowingly or not, and any issue they have is theirs.
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I don't know how people can stand unfiltered youtube. Really,
It's like every video you watch has a 10 second advert at the start of it and/or popups in the middle. How can this possibly be popular? Beats me. (shrug)
Re:I wouldn't know.... (Score:5, Informative)
https://pi-hole.net/ [pi-hole.net]
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I'll put this next to it!
https://blokada.org/index.html [blokada.org]
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Are you only against "ambush" advertising that intrudes itself into the environment you're living in, the devices you're using, and the media you're consuming? Or do you also find useless other forms of advertising like point-of-sale, classified sections, highly-targeted direct mail, and websites? Yes, the latter still spin, but at least they're pretty much opt-in.
Where do you get the desire to buy something, and how do you choose which products to buy and the vendors to buy from?
Not Psychic, Stalker . (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like everyone these days has had a paranoiac moment where a website advertises something to you that you recently purchased or was gifted without a digital trail
That doesn't feel like someone reading my mind at all. To me it feels more like someone peering in my windows and following constantly.
I'm pretty sure most people find it just as creepy as I do, even non-technical people I know have mentioned this un-prompted and also that they found it creepy.
Companies have to be really careful using techniques like this, because they often fail in horrible ways that paints the company with a brush they would not want if they knew.
Re:Not Psychic, Stalker . (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the people who don't use some form of ad blocking really are that stupid.
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"I wonder why they would show you ads for something you've already bought..."
Have you ever talked to an advertising person? Their "thought" process appears to be a mixture of Lewis Carroll, Ayn Rand, and Franz Kafka. I don't think that expecting it to make sense is likely to produce much in the way of results.
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But Lewis Carroll always makes sense, if you follow it through in detail. You don't always need to agree with him, e.g. a "rath", which Humpty Dumpty defines as a small green pig, was the title of an Irish hill tribe chieftain, but he always makes sense.
I'll admit, though, that I haven't successfully traced down the roots of "Jabberwockery". Jabber is pretty clear, but I'm uncertain about "wockery". I'm guessing the poem was inspired by someone blathering at him when he was trying to work on a math probl
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That would be the slithy toves.
But, don't mind me - I incessantly stand on my head. Do you think at my age that is right?
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Nah, try saying it as Mr.T. It makes perfect sense.
Re:Not Psychic, Stalker . (Score:5, Interesting)
They probably aren't completely sure you bought it or not.
The ad trackers will know you visited the product page. They may know the next page you visited was the shopping cart page, implying you've added it. But they can't be sure it was in your cart when you visited the checkout page, not without buying data from that particular online shop.
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They probably aren't completely sure you bought it or not.
Really?
In that case there's a LOT of money to be made by telling the advertisers what the person has purchased. That info might even be worth more than the spyware.
Or maybe you're wrong and advertisers really are that stupid.
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Too many advertisers. I suspect they are selling data about what you purchased to advertisers, but that doesn't mean every single advertiser is paying for this and getting the data. So a couple advertisers may see that you purchased a baby crib and now probably you're going to be looking for baby clothes, but there are probably hundreds of advertisers that only know you looked at baby crib ads.
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That said, maybe the sales/ops department and the marketing department are disconnected from each other, the way departments at an
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Maybe they're showing you things other people bought, who also bought the same thing as you.
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
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I think a lot of this comes from blocking too much data so they only see a small part of the picture, so that they have a flawed analytical model which makes the ad selection look stupid. Other people who say "who needs privacy?" and leave everything wide open may be seeing ads that really are highly targeted, who may or may not feel creeped out by it all.
For me, I'd rather have the stupid ads than highly targeted ads.
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They usually don't bother to filter out the people who actually bought the product because advertising is very cheap,
And this is the entire source of the problem with modern advertising. IT'S CHEAP! It's so cheap, that the advertisers don't give a damn if they target too many wrong people. It's so cheap it may as well be free. Their major expenditures are paying out to web sites that use their third party service ("don't think about it, just embed our links"). They are NOT paying out money to support the bandwidth to get the advertisements to people, instead the customers are paying to support bigger bandwidth to suppor
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Maybe they want to show you a better or cheaper item so that you'll send the other one back for a refund and buy theirs instead.
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Because they don't know how not to. The sale doesn't get communicated.
More generally, the data showed (or someone thinks it shows) an interest in something, but there is no data that shows lack of interest in something, including the sudden lack of interest that comes with a sale. (Though one might infer something, when the "theme" of searches switches from pre-purchase research to post-purchase support.)
Left hand and right hand
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I think it comes down to statistics.
Buying the same product again is not that rare. You may want to buy a second one for someone else, or you may need two but only buy the second one if the first one satisfies you. You may also be unsatisfied send it back and buy another brand, or stumble on an accessory you missed. These may be low probabilities but how are the probabilities that you now want to buy something completely different. Algorithms rely on statistics, they don't look tor the reason why, so if sug
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Well lets face it, psychics are normally stalking you for information. Either that, or just making generic guesses until one of them is a match for your situation.
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No. Thats psychotics.
Now we have Artificial Intelligence, we also have to put up with Artificial Psychotics. It is a natural consequence of all those GPUs eating Brainz.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Not Psychic, Stalker . (Score:2)
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Re: Not Psychic, Stalker . (Score:2)
Re: Not Psychic, Stalker . (Score:2)
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That doesn't feel like someone reading my mind at all. To me it feels more like someone peering in my windows and following constantly.
That sounds a lot like paranoia.
Do you feel the same about people in the street? People who look at you? Do you have feelings of hostility towards the mailman, who might actually know what he is delivering - is that an invasion of your privacy? Of the supermarket checkout person who sees all the stuff you buy - as does everyone else in the queue, behind you?
It isn't creepy. It is just part of everyday life. If you don't like it, go and live in a cabin in the woods on your own. Grow your own food and nev
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I guess it’s a question of intent. And much of society is built on trust. So although the amount of information that’s being gathered will surprise people, for most it’s a big meh. They have lots of “data” scraps and computers are not terribly smart about making sense of it. Psychology is more art and guesswork than science. There’s plenty of real problems to worry about in life.
Not to get all James Randi on you, but... (Score:3)
Peering in your windows (or something like that) is how psychics work. Even Jim Jones knew to dig through his members' garbage in order to later impress them enough to drink the Kool-Aid.
If it seems like they're peering in your windows, that's probably the most authentic psychic experience you can have. How would you expect it to feel different?
If AI doesn't feel predictive... (Score:1)
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But AI shouldn't be able to predict future behaviors so this is stalkerish rather than facts-based.
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Even if is an AI to predict failure?
An ad that advertises something I recently bought. (Score:2)
Hmm, seems like a really badly targeted ad to me.
After all, if I just bought one, I'm not terribly likely to buy another right away....
Unless we're talking consumables. Ads trying to sell me consumables is neither surprising nor especially annoying. Because I have mastered the secret to happiness - I ignore ALL ads....
It's a variant of "small office telepathy" (Score:2)
You get really bizzare effects when people become aware of random facts about one another. I used to work in a small company in a small room, and could jump in any time it was helpful. We fixes some subtle bugs that way. Alas, this doesn't work for larger incarnations, even of the same company. Some kind of communications hierarchy is needed.
Now, if I were communicating with an AI (or just artificially stupid) agent of the advertiser, we might have a more useful discussion. The classic one might be "I jus
Re:It's a variant of "small office telepathy" (Score:4, Interesting)
Or if we could let the AI know about who we WANT to be, to get pushed in that direction: e.g. healthy food, education opportunities, etc. That would be nice too.
Digital Ads are fucking pathetic and terrible. (Score:4, Insightful)
I keep hearing Amazon and Google and all of these companies bragging about how incredible their AI are and all of these places telling us how unbelievably accurate their ad tracking and advertising methods are for targeting an individual.
Then I go online (to Amazon or anywhere else) and the ads I get are for the thing I *just* fucking bought yesterday.
Hey, dipshit... how many 65" widescreen HDTVs do you think I'm in the market for this week? The time to try and sell me one was *before* I bought one yesterday. Not after.
Sorry, but AI has yet to be more than a bunch of "if then else" loops. I don't give a fuck. Bots aren't taking over jack shit in this century when they can't even figure out when I'm less likely to buy a $5k tv.
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Really? My experience is that Amazon shows me stuff that I looked at six weeks ago, but didn't buy. That sort of make sense ... As much as anything on the modern Internet makes sense. Maybe I forgot about it, but still am interested? ... Could happen I suppose ... Maybe once or even twice a decade.
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True. Take my supermarket. I always shop there. And I have a apecifi diet. I am strict about my diet. You’d think by now some AI could have spotted a pattern and not given me offers constantly for stuff I never buy in years. AIs have to be trained.
Too bad it doesn't work (Score:2)
In a previous life we wanted 3% (Score:5, Interesting)
These days, 1% is good
In a previous life (Xanaro), we were doing bound-in ads in a print pub, and knew we would have succeeded sy a 3% response rate.
These days, advertisers struggle for 1%, which means they're doing something rather badly
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These days advertisers are competing against 1000's of times more competition than back in the print only ad days.
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I've had enough of marketing lies (Score:3)
This is from a digital marketer trying to convince you that your life will be better through digital marketing, until you think about the dangers of it. First off, more than 50% of americans think its wrong for the government to monitor others, and the 2nd most thing that people try to avoid while online are advertisers at 30% (and all bet that the rest of them don't know that their every move online is being monitored. If you were talking to your friend on the street, and a third person started listening in on your conversation, how many of us would tolerate that? Most of us do this every day on line.
The organs word in the article also stems from a book called 'Gulag Archipelago' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the word organs refers to the intelligence network setup by the Soviets which they used to throw 66 million people into jail. Why you would use this word in a marketing article is sheer stupidity. We are only scratching the surface on abuse of what should be private digital information, and someday the axe could come down hard on us.
If the marketers really 'knew' who I was they would quickly realize that I've only clicked on under 10 ads a year. They wouldn't even display them on websites because they would know that I find ads unappealing. They would realize that it is no use to show me digital ads. I guess they don't know me well enough yet, and that's a good thing.
What ads? (Score:3)
Wait, you want to tell me there are still people who don't use adblockers and privacy browsers or at least privacy extensions?
I might be getting a free PS3 controller (Score:2)
Got email today implying I'm getting a free PS3 controller Any Time Now (tm), and asking me to review it.
I think I could learn to like this new economy
If they were really "psychic" (Score:2)
.. they would be better
Yeah, after I buy something, I often see a lot of ads for the same thing from different sellers, or a similar product from different manufacturers
This is a stupid waste of ad spending. I already made my decision
"Psychic" ads would give me interesting alternatives for products I'm researching
Typo in Subject line (Score:1)
google does image recognition (Score:2)
if you buy something and text someone about it on an android phone google will know. one time my wife texted me a picture of something for the kids and within the hour i start getting ads about it.
personally i don't care. most of the ads i get is stuff i looked at just for info with little intention of buying RIGHT NOW. or stuff i just bought. Like why the fuck would i need two SSD drives right after I bought one? if i needed a second one i would have bought two of them. or why would i need a second $150 bi
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Her phone tracked her location within the store, and noted that she stopped in a particular aisle for a while.
I stood in the shelving aisle at Fred Meyer just to be out of the way while taking a long phone call from a client; got shelving ads, for the brand they sold in that aisle, for several weeks afterwards.
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Stop supporting ads (Score:2)
Dont have gps track you. Use a map.
Cover that web cam. Use a cam with people you want to cam with.
Dont use a free OS from an ad company. Ensure a real OS can block ads and tracking.
Dont use a free OS from a brand that supported the NSA and GCHQ. Stop supporting brands that wont secure their own products, services, networks.
Dont use a free OS from a brand that never had the skill to detect the NS
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What ads? (Score:2)
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That the smart TV is not sending back details about every media file watched.
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That explains it. The other day, my PC was acting up so I was yelling "Fuck, fuck, fuck!". Then I got ads for condoms!
Weird shit that happened (Score:4, Interesting)
Was in Target with the wife and kids. Wife was grabbing a few things off one aisle while I turned down the coffee maker aisle and waited on her. I was killing time and talking to the kids in our cart. Wasn't looking at coffee makers. Had not shopped for them on the web either. We don't talk about coffee makers, because we have one. That night on my Facebook feed: coffee makers! Oodles and oodles of the fucking things!
A few weeks later, a buddy is over visiting and we are in the garage having a beer. I told him my wife wants me to get a shed for the yard equipment. Conversation ends there. Here comes Facebook with tool sheds!
My wife was talking to her cousin about how her brother rented a bounce house for his kid's birthday. Bounce houses in her facebook feed!
I then realized my phone's microphone was enabled for Facebook, so I turned it off. Facebook denies they do this citing the demands of data, but I think their denial highly dubious given they can easily look for keywords to make ads relevant.
I guess Target could uniquely identify me and track my position in the store via wifi and, since I likely it isn't unreasonable I opened the Facebook app in the store, I was waiting to have that data linked to my profile.
On some other spying notes, my company has banned Alexa in all corporate offices since she records and stores everything and that data can be subpoenaed. Also, I recently heard Alexa maybe serving your hotel room! Next time you're in a hotel, just start talking to Alexa and see if she answers. You may get a sneak peak at the new service they're planning on rolling out!
Re:Weird shit that happened (Score:4, Insightful)
That should be "psychic" (Score:2)
Inexpertly targeted (Score:3)
I see a lot of targeted adds, but they seem very badly targeted. I get adds for things I've already bought. Recommendations for hotels in places I've just left. Adds for things that seem similar to things that I do, but which are not usually correlated. Meanwhile I don't get adds for things I am actively trying to find (either in my work life or in my personal life).
It feels very open-loop, as if they are not making any use of information on what is actually purchased as a result of the adds, as opposed to things that are correlated. Showing car adds to someone who just bought a car is really stupid.
So I'm not surprised that I'm being tracked, but I am surprised that advertisers don't do a better job with all the information that they have about me.
With a good ad-blocker, they just feel absent (Score:2)
When I turn the ad-blocker off, I just stop to want to surf the web anyways, so I do not even feel guilty...
I like to look at watches (Score:2)
So I click on watch ads all the time. As a result, I get almost exclusively watch, bracelet and ring ads. Some are for watches in the $250k range. Sorry, I am sticking with my $35 Timex watch. It tells time just as well, off by 10 seconds/month for you nerdy types.
I just drove past (Score:2)
I drove past a van for a small plumbing business with an unusual business name (can't remember now, but it stuck out at the time). Within 24 hours I was getting ads for them.
The only escape is not playing (Score:2)
Facebook responded that users can discern the use of third-party data if they know where to look. Each time an ad appears using such data, Facebook says, users can click a button on the ad revealing that fact.
Not to mention, now their profile on you records that you are the type of person who clicks on buttons for more information about ads.
Really? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
FWIW, cows don't like to be branded either.
Re: Advertisers getting smarter? Doubt it. (Score:3, Funny)
It sounds like we have a branding problem and should probably pull together a quick focus group.
Re: (Score:2)
Daily Chrome user here... I can't remember the last time I saw an ad that wasn't made of paper.
Re: (Score:2)
I should maybe reiterate... Chrome, Gmail, iPhone, Alexa, Facebook user. And also, I should correct myself. I do see ads in Amazon and Ebay search results, as well as Facebook posts, which are irritating. Solution: a little less FaceBook :)