Did you get a receipt by mail to your gmail, by any chance?
Google analyzes receipts. When I still used gmail, it would automatically add flights to my calendar based exclusively on the receipt sent to my gmail account.
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?
#92Earlier 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.
Amazon went from showing every item in order confirmation emails, to showing none. That tells me they don't believe Google's promises either.
Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but neither of us had searched for that or anything, and I use DDG and uBO so it's not likely it'd be tracked.
A friend demonstrated me this with her Google Pixel. We talked for a bit about a very conspicuous topic in presence of the phone, and the Google app (which shows a news feed when you open it) started showing articles relevant to the topic within a few minutes. At that point I believed her that her phone is listening, though I didn’t make a big deal of it because she did not make an effort to configure her phone not t…
I doubt they have such a good recognition model for Greek, plus my DNS blocks Google at that level, and I have a Xiaomi phone. Not that it's impossible, but it's less likely, plus the battery would die quickly.
Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?
#94Did you pay with Google Pay?
Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
>VISA marketing Why is this even a thing? Maybe I should just go back to buying everything with cash, it's impossible to keep up with all the crap we need to disable or hack around
> > Visa marketing I guess this is one of the things that just has to be forbidden by law.
In Germany (and probably all of Europe), it is forbidden by law.
Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?
#96I suspect all the people putting this claim on the same level as "my phone is listening to me" conspiracy theories are living outside of the USA. One of the first things I noticed after moving to America was that I was being served ads for oddly specific in-store purchases. I checked my bank's terms and discovered that, sure enough, they were sharing my transaction history with "non-affiliates" so that they could mar…
Well the other problem in America is the payment rails are very primitive. How does your credit card company know which items you’re buying, when the payment description will be something cryptic that you can only sometimes even match to the store name and that’s it. It’s not like your credit card company gets an itemized receipt of your purchases.
I’ve actually worked at a company that was purchasing this data from banks, it was all anonymized and we were looking for trends. Maybe there are other companies that are able to buy the pii data and use it for marketing, but I think there are better, simpler sources. The stores/brands themselves can sell the data about their customers, or they are passing it to google to run targeted ads on their own customers and then google now has that data too and can use it for other things, etc.
Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend demonstrated me this with her Google Pixel. We talked for a bit about a very conspicuous topic in presence of the phone, and the Google app (which shows a news feed when you open it) started showing articles relevant to the topic within a few minutes. At that point I believed her that her phone is listening, though I didn’t make a big deal of it because she did not make an effort to configure her phone not t…
I doubt they have such a good recognition model for Greek, plus my DNS blocks Google at that level, and I have a Xiaomi phone. Not that it's impossible, but it's less likely, plus the battery would die quickly.
I see. We talked in English, and there was no blocking.
Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?
#98It might be that you are just noticing the ads now that you bought the product. I read about similar observations recently. Might be a cousin of frequency illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion?wprov=sfti1
I doubt Voltaren is advertised commonly enough that he got ads before. I no longer have a Android phone, but too frequently I would buy something offline and have the item follow me - including impulse buys and things that I definitely didn't look for online. It happened with things I would talk about as well on occasion. I joked in front of my phone about visiting Greece, and a few minutes later auto-suggest in Goog…
Keep in mind that he is some guy on the internet. There are lots of people on the internet. While it's unlikely for it to happen to him in particular, it's not that unlikely that there is someone on the whole internet that it happened to. Now I'm not saying that it is a coincidence, merely that as far as I can tell it could be.
Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?
#99[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: I bought Voltaren at the chemist, now Google shows me ads for it. Why?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could always either compress the audio or do a speech to text (looking for keywords rather than caring about getting the whole context correct), and batch upload the results on an interval (like when checking for email or app/system updates).
That would still absolutely kill the battery.
Once a minute (or five, ten, whatever), turn on the microphone for one second. If voice detected, record a bit and process. Doesn't need to be always on, and as a feature missing keywords sometimes adds to the doubt that it exists ("I said 'pfizer' and got ads, you said 'pfizer' and didn't, must be something else).