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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?

#421

Post by reaperducer »

worik wrote: post #397
reaperducer wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Google link the real life person who bought Voltaren at a store to the online account or fingerprint that browses the Internet? Often, through the payment. People use the same payment methods in the same stores over and over. This data is accumulated by the stores, and sold. if you signed up for a "points card" or some other gimmick to get 2¢ off something, the personal information you used when you signed u…

Hmmm.... Use cash!

Use cash!

It's a start. But unfortunately, doesn't get you out of a lot of the other surveillance methods.

Also, paying cash is yet another bit of entropy. Like using Firefox.

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

#422

Post by johnsmith4739 »

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: you were having ad-blindness until your purchase that brought up to your conscious level the "Voltaren" concept. As you cannot recall the previous cases where you saw the ad because it did not make it into your conscious mind, it seems that the ads started only after your purchase.

Your perception works in 2 modes - bottom-up (signal processing) - and the ad didn't make it through - and top-down (pattern recognition) - exactly the experience you report - you recognise a recent pattern.

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

#423

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

My money would be on coincidence. How often did you buy something and got irrelevant ads?

I had such a coincidence happen to me once. I saw an ad for a product I've never heard about online... and a short while later, I saw the same ad on non-smart broadcast TV, billboard, in print or some similar place where I could be sure that the ad was not targeted. Had it happened the other way around, I would have doubted it myself, but it was clear that this could not have been anything but coincidence.

Besides that, why would the company behind it spend money on promoting the very product that you already bought? If anything, the fact that you bought it would be used to not show you ads, at least until some time later when you'd be likely to buy another one. (Retargeting frequently gets this wrong because they see the interest but don't get the purchase information.)

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

#424

Post by foobiter »

zubi wrote: post #203

March 2020, heydays of coronavirus paranoia. I came back home from somewhere, put my keys onto the dining table and went to the bathroom to clean up. My girlfriend, upon seeing the key-chain on the table started reproaching me for being careless about hygiene. When I returned from the bathroom I saw her washing the key-chain in the kitchen sink. This time I got angry and asked how come she hadn't thought that the usb…

did you delete facebook?

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

#426

Post by kube-system »

continuations wrote: post #297
jonahbenton wrote: post #205

Not coincidence. Not "bank purchase history" shared with google- in most cases banks and credit cards don't know item level detail. Lots of ways this data flow could happen, at least in the US. Happy to go through specific details I have seen if you want to share more about this, but two high level points 1. Remember that when you purchase something, the data about the purchase is BOTH yours AND the entity from whom…

How does Google link the real life person who bought Voltaren at a store to the online account or fingerprint that browses the Internet?

There's a lot of online marketing companies that do a lot of work in this area. It's pretty easy to do if you have any kind of ID or token to link the data. It can be done with credit card numbers, a phone's location services, membership programs, coupons, etc. Here's some of the stuff Facebook does, which just scratches the surface of what is possible:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1150627594978290

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

#427

Post by thisiswater »

I would like to contribute an anecdote which turned me from a "google is listening" skeptic to someone who turns their phone off as often as possible, especially during any kind of sensitive conversation. I'm one degree removed from this anecdote, but I have no reason to doubt its truth.

A group of friends were on a road trip, driving for several days cross-country. These are university-aged young males, 20-23. None have any interest in starting a family any time soon.

At the beginning of the trip, they agreed (verbally) to test if google was listening by discussing "nappies" intermittently, loudly and jokingly. They would only discuss nappies in person - everyone agreed not to mention this on any digital channel whatsoever, not to look up nappies for any reason, etc. That is, they deliberately excluded nappies from their online lives.

They chose nappies specifically because they're completely irrelevant. None had ever to their knowledge been delivered an ad for nappies. None had ever purchased nappies or any baby product.

Sure enough, end of the trip - ads for nappies.

I would love an explanation more plausible than their phones were listening.

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

#428

Post by mulmen »

corobo wrote: post #111
mulmen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the risk here? Am I branded as a terrorist for opting out of marketing? What’s the logic?

Lists can be used for things other than terrorists

Obviously, such as tracking who opted out of marketing based on their credit card spend.

The question is what unintended (and specifically undesirable) consequences that poses to the members of the list.

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

#429

Post by glangdale »

zubi wrote: post #203

March 2020, heydays of coronavirus paranoia. I came back home from somewhere, put my keys onto the dining table and went to the bathroom to clean up. My girlfriend, upon seeing the key-chain on the table started reproaching me for being careless about hygiene. When I returned from the bathroom I saw her washing the key-chain in the kitchen sink. This time I got angry and asked how come she hadn't thought that the usb…

We've (my wife and I) had a few odd ones like this too. That being said, no-one has substantiated this - which, to me, doesn't mean as much as people thinks it does.

Suppose you were building this capability. Would you necessarily leave it on 100% of the time, and if someone started acting 'weird' around their phone ("hey, I'm sitting in a lab, and someone is just talking to me a lot") it might be a good time to turn off the capability.

Plenty of malware knows to turn itself off when someone has Wireshark installed (or a number of other "tells" that the malware can get that you might be running on a security researcher's machine). Even simply running microphone-based data gathering infrequently might be enough to confound a journalist or researcher with limited time budget.

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

#430

Post by alex_g »

joering2 wrote: post #367
alex_g wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. I do fit the demographic, I have looked up pages related to Kombucha in the past (thought not in the last 6 months), and I did dwell on the first ad in amazement. Still, I got home from the store and started seeing the ads immediately.

Have you spoke with someone about it? IOS and Android can easily analyze what you say and send relevant keywords home. This is very evil genius in a way that they do not send your voice feed neither your full sentences but only keywords that the law describe as "metatags" that courts found no to be an abuse of your 4A in the past. In fact, you didn't even have to be on the phone. You could just come home and told you…

Do you have any evidence of iOS analyzing and transmitting keywords? It's one thing to say it's technically possible and another to say it's happening.
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