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Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

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Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

#191

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

pen2l wrote: post #159

Tangentially related, for the first time ever I saw Gmail losing its anti-spam game. We were doing some home-modeling and we went to Home Depot sometime early this month. And... some entity somehow discovered this. And then all of a sudden I started getting spam emails related to Home Depot's/home rebuilding. The spam emails successfully pass through gmail's filter because they seem to emanate from aol,gmail,hotmail,…

Ebay sends me spam emails every day. Technically I guess it doesn't count as spam because they originate from ebay.com and I "consented" by signing up an account with them, but to me they're every bit as annoying and toxic as bona-fide spam.

Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

#192

Post by klyrs »

zaptrem wrote: post #187
duckfang wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever places wantba phone number for ad and/or discount stuff, use: (Local area code) 867-5309 There's always an account, and it's a 100% gamble if this purchase you get something.

What’s the significance of this number?

It's a popular song wherein the artist doxed some gal named Jenny. Just google that number

Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

#193

Post by murukesh_s »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #66
murukesh_s wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also google may read your email (if you are using gmail) - which contains your bank receipt (so seller), time and amount.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en > We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.

thats good to know but they don't say they don't read your messages (and keep your profile) for other reasons other than ads. I remember i got a message in google search saying you have purchased this product - not sure of the year, but they were clearly reading my mail then..[1]

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-stop-reading-users-em...

Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

#194

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #107
baybal2 wrote: post #29

Opt out of VISA marketing https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do Second, disable GPS, and cellphone tower ID reporting (root needed.) So Google can't correlate you with sales records. At the moment, there is no way to disable Google AGPS spying on the stock Android. Third, block Google apps from reading your IMEI/IMSI/serial number, so they can't get AGPS data from your cellphone provider if it sell…

This is the dumbest ad strategy ever. Why on earth would ads about a product you just bought be effective marketing material. This is like how you get a million ads about dishwashers the day after you Google around and buy one. At least wait for a short duration of time to let the target run out of medicine before adversiting new stuff.

Simple Bayesian logic.

P(buying crap) Advertising is applied statistics and works on large cohorts. Nobody cares about you personally or your psychology.

Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

#197

Post by throwaway823882 »

pen2l wrote: post #159

Tangentially related, for the first time ever I saw Gmail losing its anti-spam game. We were doing some home-modeling and we went to Home Depot sometime early this month. And... some entity somehow discovered this. And then all of a sudden I started getting spam emails related to Home Depot's/home rebuilding. The spam emails successfully pass through gmail's filter because they seem to emanate from aol,gmail,hotmail,…

Old school internet ad tech worked around what you are trying to do. We were doing this in 2003, before Google started up AdSense and well before acquiring DoubleClick.

The way it worked at [former employer] was, we had a lot of digital properties. Every digital property collected analytics on all visitors. All that analytics got post-processed and cross-referenced until we could form a "profile" on every visitor. Because you leave a teeny tiny trail of information everywhere you go, we cobble it all together until we know who you are on each site. The probability just gets higher as we collect more data. And we'd collect data from everywhere - e-mail marketing campaigns, ad traffic on partner sites, user profile data, web surfing habits, and buying access to privately maintained databases.

Even if everyone wore a mask and black clothes everywhere they went, surveillance cameras still capture height, gait, mannerisms. Watch long enough and you know "Gait #24434 mannerisms #593483 height #933 goes in/out of this residence at these specific times, goes to this supermarket, goes to this nail salon, sometimes goes to a house somebody else seems to live in".

Maybe it's multiple people with the same gait, mannerisms, height - but in the same neighborhood? In any case, it doesn't matter if they are all different people as long as they behave the same way; we market to them the same. Your entire life is just a string of digits in a marketing-recommender algorithm.

Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

#198

Post by kalamani »

durnygbur wrote: post #125

I say " " (turquoise skirt, hand truck) with iphone laying in radius 3m. Later on while browsing the internet with Safari on the device I see ads selling this product. Other than this, Whatsapp is scanning the conversations for keywords and brand names - there is no doubt even.

A few years back, I saw an online rumor, that I decided to try for myself.

I left my (locked) iPhone 6 in front of a TV overnight, that was left on a Spanish channel.

The next day, ALL of my Facebook ads, across all devices, were in Spanish — along with about 20% of the ads that I came across during regular web browsing. Took about a month for them to revert back to English.

I do not speak Spanish. At the time, I lived in a rural New England area, where census data reported very low Hispanic population. Zero reason for me to get targeted with alternative language advertisements.

I’m not a Luddite of any kind. Several decades of tech industry experience, specifically with ecommerce software engineering. Hold all available certifications for Google marketing, Facebook marketing, Hubspot marketing, along with many more. Know quite a bit more about this topic than the average Joe, and it concerns the hell out of me.

Since that day, Facebook’s apps haven’t been allowed on any of my devices, and their services only get used by me for work purposes.

Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

#199

Post by jsjohnst »

rahilb wrote: post #30

It’s probably a coincidence or just the worst advertisers on the planet. Why would I show an ad to someone who literally just bought my thing?

> Why would I show an ad to someone who literally just bought my thing?

The majority of targeted advertising I see is for items I just bought. There’s also a reasonable explanation for this...

Not every merchant shares purchase data, so if you do any research anywhere before making a purchase, they know you are interested, but as there was no tracking beacon on the site you ultimately bought from (or the purchase was misidentified or delayed or any number of reasons), that’s why you are now seeing targeted ads for it.

Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?

#200

Post by carlmr »

taneq wrote: post #156
carlmr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well my girlfriend just bought a laptop, it was broken, she returned it, she bought a different laptop, again broken, and now bought a third one. Looking at how many products are DOA nowadays, it might be that a person that just bought something is more likely to buy it again than the average person. Also in general I've noticed there are a lot of people that return online purchases a lot, even the non broken ones, s…

Is she buying them secondhand? What’s the DOA rate on laptops these days? Two in a row must be rather unlikely.

They are all new, I'm guessing bad luck.
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