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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?

#411

Post by tyoma »

icoder wrote: post #406
tyoma wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strategy is extremely effective, especially for high-priced but rarely purchased items like dishwashers, cars, flooring, etc. Consider: one of the hardest parts about advertising is figuring out when someone is ready to buy the product. That is why car companies bombard ads everywhere, just to catch you in the rare moment when you may be buying a car. Lets guess that maybe the odds of a random person wanting to b…

I'm sorry but that doesn't make sense to me at all. Is that based on anything more than intuition because if not I'd like to say that mine sides with op. I'll add some numbers too. If a dishwasher has a lifetime of 20 years and a person is 'sensitive' to adds for dishwashers for a month surrounding the time it breaks, you're talking about a 1 in 240 chance if you 'randomly' target people with a dishwasher, which shou…

I do not have concrete numbers, but would love to know for sure if anyone on HN is from the industry.

I think once your dishwasher breaks, the time you are “live” to buy is closer to a week :). Also it is (maybe?) harder to identify a person with a broken dishwasher than one who just bought one and may need another.

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

#412

Post by paul_f »

aplummer wrote: post #357
otterley wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, you can’t use personal health information for marketing purposes. If you can prove this link, a lot of very large organizations could potentially be in serious trouble for HIPAA violations. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...

The shop part (non-pharmacy) of a chemist isn’t a covered entity though right, so hipaa isn’t relevant at all?

A pharmacy is a covered entity, a retail store is not. Does not appear this falls under HIPAA

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

#413

Post by g8oz »

I guarantee this type of tracking is going. And I'm sure that the marketing industry is aware that these tactics are running on borrowed time. Once the mechanics of how it's being done are collated by EFF type activists it will turn into a political narrative and action will be taken. Right now people are too confused by their strange experiences, doubting themselves and swayed by less outlandish alternative explanations. Sometimes the hooves you hear are in fact zebras not horses.

The players in the surveillance ecosystem have shaped themselves into narrow forms that allow for plausible deniability. App makers, device makers, the monetization SDK providers, the re-targeting platforms with their Orwellian forecasting & optimization calculations and especially the data brokers each play their part in a division of labor as powerful as Adam Smith's pin factory.

The pushback will come from the EU in my opinion. The U.S Big Tech file is going to be taken up with tackling the monopoly power of platforms for the next few years.

In the meantime beware of free apps on your phone and look up how to opt out of marketing on your smart TV. Pay for sensitive items with cash. If your phone is Android use the Firefox browser with the uBlock Origin plugin.

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

#414

Post by jamesrr39 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #194
jeroenhd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Upvoted, this is a great comment. Thanks for finding the words to sum it up so concisely.

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

#415

Post by TeMPOraL »

IX-103 wrote: post #302
newswasboring wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have acknowledged that my reasoning is less sound than the occam's razor, and I didn't really assert data impropriety. So calm down. But about your first point. I don't think even the designers and maintainers of this blackbox understand the system. Looking at it from that point of view, the chances of a hacker finding proof for this is pretty low.

The thing is you can disapprove one piece without understanding the whole system. It would be pretty easy to show that a) sound is not being continually recorded and streamed over the internet and b) the device is not using enough processing power to decode speech. Both have been done, so this is veering into conspiracy theory territory.

FWIW, streaming voice over the Internet isn't required for this attack - all the software needs is to send a few bytes long tag indicating the topic of an overheard conversation.

The processing power required for this isn't big either - remember that 12+ years ago Microsoft Windows shipped with a speech recognition system that was in many ways better than what the phones currently offer, and worked off-line and with almost unnoticeable performance penalty. And if you're interested in probabilistic reporting ("there's 86% I've heard a word matching this tag in the last hour..."), you can relax performance requirements even further.

So, out of the things you mention, the only somewhat convincing piece of evidence would be that the apps in question are not accessing microphone in the background.

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

#416

Post by root_axis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #402
KaseKun wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, though this is an excellent story, this is just an example of a bias known as "frequency illusion". It happens with a lot of things, like seeing the clock at 11:11 more than you do at 11:09. Or seeing lots of your make/model car but being blind to the hundred of other variants on the road. How many times have you opened up your laptop and not seen a Facebook add for something you just did, or something…

Sure. Except in the last three years that "frequency illusion" has been happening to me with a... growing frequency. About every 2-3 months, Facebook shows my wife an ad for some completely random shit we're sure neither of us searched for before or mentioned to anyone else. I would agree with you last decade. This decade, I have my doubts.

There is great statistical power in these ML models, in many cases the "random shit" will become the topic of conversation due to shared social factors that can be predicted, you simply neglect to recognize all the times the modeling failed.

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

#418

Post by TeMPOraL »

fraud wrote: post #260
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit, Facebook was found around 2015-2016 to be draining iPhone batteries with background audio sessions. While they may have gotten more efficient with their methods it wouldn't be surprising if they were still recording audio. There's a moral hazard that incentivizes any company that can do so to bug user's homes for advertising purposes. IMO it should be illegal.

My issue with the whole idea of background recording for advertising is that it would be incredibly costly to store this data, transcribe the audio and turn it into anything even remotely meaningful for advertisers. I also don’t know a lot on this subject so if anyone has better info that’d be great.

You can easily process the audio on the fly and reduce it to a probabilistic estimate of whether a tag from a predefined topic set was present in the conversation. Doesn't need to be 100% accurate. You don't need to store the audio - just stream it through the recognizer. The output of such recognizer will be something on the order of 8-32 bytes (an int for tag, a float for probability, an int64 for timestamp), possibly less if one's clever - and it only needs to be stored until the next opportunity to send it out.

Also: people seem to be looking at modern speech recognizers on their phones and wrongly concluding that speech recognition in general is very compute-intensive. It isn't, if you're willing to make some sacrifices on accuracy and generality, and to do it locally instead voice data off to a cloud somewhere. A proper benchmark here isn't Siri or Google Assistant - it's Microsoft Speech API, as shipped with Windows 12+ years ago.

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

#419

Post by vbsteven »

whimsicalism wrote: post #407
vbsteven wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment was an expansion on GPs second bullet point. It’s not Google that knows about the purchase, but Google that “somehow” picked up contextual info from OPs environment linking OPs online identity to Voltaren as a product. Edit: the purchase could have been involved somewhere in the chain but it’s not necessary.

> Your purchase landed some key about you in a bucket that was mixed and repackaged with many other keys that the advertiser knows as "keys recently interested in Voltaren." There's not really that much ambiguity in this sentence from the second bullet point. Unless my mental model of online advertising is wrong, your physical in-store purchase should not be landing you in some Google advertising bucket.

I completely agree that they should not show up. It looks like I went lightly over that sentence and focussed more on the one after:

> Some of those keys are related to people who bought it, or who searched for it, or more indirectly who lingered while reading a page with an ad for it...and in most cases are very short lived.

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

#420

Post by guerrilla »

durnygbur wrote: post #163
foxhop wrote: post #54

Are there credit card companies which do not sell transaction data?

In Europe, are there any other credit and debit card companies which are not VISA, MasterCard, or Maestro?

Maestro is MasterCard btw
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