How to See What the Internet Knows About You • Hacker News Board

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#81

Post by squarefoot » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 7:41 AM UTC

" The ad on this site was an Amazon ad for a pool filter I bought on Amazon about a week ago. It should know that I don't need these for like another year now. The other was for a cruise which I just got back from last week. "

Advertising isn't just about what you really need, but also about what you will need more, or again, or earlier, because the commercial impressed the product need in your head. Neuromarketing is a science nowadays, and is pretty scary to me.

Some interesting content on the topic here. http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/home

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#82

Post by callesgg » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 9:34 AM UTC

I find it interesting that the internet is talked about as a monolithic entity. Rather than as a bunch of different services and communities.

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#83

Post by gaius » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 10:46 AM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #57

gaius wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, but this engine doesn't exist, and in 15+ years of weaponised adtech, noone's been sufficiently economically incentivised to make it. Telling, no?

You're underestimating how hard it would be to build such an engine. Google and Facebook have sunk $billions into their knowledge graphs so far, and not made much of a dent.

Maybe. The current heuristic is "he has bought X so show him an ad for X", but would it be so difficult to flip that to "he has bought X so show him the next thing on the list of interests we know he has" or even just "anything but X". I strongly suspect noone is doing this because there is no point, they get paid the same regardless.

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#84

Post by OJFord » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:05 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #30

jcoffland wrote: post #9

Most of what the article complains about can be solved with an ad blocker. The rest by staying off of Facebook.

Staying off Facebook means committing social semi-suicide for a lot of people. It's the primary channel for my local community, contacting local elected representatives, family members in distant places, and several sociopolitical communities of which I'm a part. For many people it's a necessity, and other channels like email etc. are far less efficient precisely because they don't leverage the networking effects. Th…

> It's the primary channel for my local community, contacting local elected representatives,

Which should be recognised as madness in itself. Hopefully you're mistaken, and it's merely one such channel.

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#85

Post by OJFord » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 11:09 AM UTC

whatsmyhandle wrote: post #35

I generally consider targeted ads to be relatively harmless, with one major recent exception: I'm starting to shop for an engagement ring, but since I live with my GF I have to do online research in Incognito mode so ads don't ruin what I hope to be a surprise someday. File this under "things peeps didn't have to worry about 10-15 years ago"

Careful, 'incognito' mode doesn't store cookies, but it's not a VPN, or otherwise masking your IP address or location.

(Obviously, it also doesn't stop tracking based on being logged into a Google account either for example, but I assume you thought of that!)

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#86

Post by tjoff » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:08 PM UTC

propogandist wrote: post #76

commenter98456 wrote: post #24

Why is targeted advertising acceptable? it is not ok for a seller to stalk potential buyers. I get that everyone has accepted this as a "fact of life" but consider how TV advertising was done. The advertisement is tailored to the show you are watching and the time of day. In other words, if I'm on a tech blog, advertise to me tech products, if I'm reading a cooking recipe, advertise kitchenware,grocery delivery and t…

TV ads are overpriced garbage, spray and pray. YT is getting into the TV business to show you targeted ads. You clearly are unaware of the motivations of the ad industry and advertisers... we want to know everything about consumers, so the ad can hit them at the right moment in time and/or influence you to do our bidding. The whole target pages, not people...that's the old way of advertising and the performance is ga…

"so the ad can hit them at the right moment in time and/or influence you to do our bidding."

... yet they can't, not in a million years. And yet we sold our privacy so that they could barely attempt something.

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#87

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 1:52 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #44

gaius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true, because who is clicking on these ads for things they already own?

An intelligent advertising engine would know the typical interval between two purchases of the same product, and start advertising similar products just before that interval has elapsed since the last purchase. Examples: pool filter: 12 months reptile UV lamp: 6 months gift-wrapping paper: 12 months oil filter, recycling box, 5 qt oil: 4 months 8-ct paper towel rolls: 2 months television: 4 years automobile: 10 years…

That's the intuition, but I wonder if there isn't a spike in near-term repurchase behavior that the algorithms are correctly exploiting?

Ex: I bought a vacuum, but I'm unhappy with it. I bought a pool or oil filter, but it was the wrong one. I bought an X, but it was defective. I bought an 8-ct of paper towels because I run a cleaning service or property management company and use a lot of paper towels. I bought a pair of jeans and they're the wrong size or I bought a pair of jeans and they're exactly the right size and now I want to order 3 more pair so I can have the ones I like.

Years ago, we built a conditional offer engine and the humans operating it kept complaining that it was "broken" because it was suggesting non-sensical combinations. In split-run, those non-sensical combinations were clear winners, even if the humans couldn't get comfortable with them.

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#88

Post by omnifischer » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 2:08 PM UTC

i2shar wrote: post #78

propogandist wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no script's not very useful anymore for desktop, you need something like uMatrix for the modern web

I researched and installed uMatrix immediately, but (due respect to the creator) the application is so hard to use and broke several web pages. I also installed WebRTC Leak Prevent Tool that helped a little.

Disable all these preferences from firefox! https://github.com/TheCreeper/PrivacyFox

Add: https://github.com/straytachyon/dnsmasq_ad_block_script

Add2: You can even block select corp: https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists

Add3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11791052

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#89

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 2:21 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #44

gaius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true, because who is clicking on these ads for things they already own?

An intelligent advertising engine would know the typical interval between two purchases of the same product, and start advertising similar products just before that interval has elapsed since the last purchase. Examples: pool filter: 12 months reptile UV lamp: 6 months gift-wrapping paper: 12 months oil filter, recycling box, 5 qt oil: 4 months 8-ct paper towel rolls: 2 months television: 4 years automobile: 10 years…

Acxiom has done this in a more invasive way for decades: figure out women's menstrual cycle and then mail them ads when they will be most likely to make a purchase according to prior research.

Re: How to See What the Internet Knows About You

#90

Post by skierscott » Sat, Jul 08, 2017, 2:48 PM UTC

jasonrhaas wrote: post #16

I recently got tired of all the creepy targeted advertising, so I hit the nuclear option. Turned off all targeted ads on all social networks, cleared all cookies, all search histories, and installed the Disconnect Chrome extension. Also disabled all images in my email to stop those email trackers. I've always used an ad-blocker but I don't think that stops the data collection aspects of it. I've always known this is…

> 1. Data can we used against you in ways you might not understand or have considered.

> 3. I don't like the idea of people making money off my data without my knowledge

Ditto.

Collecting massive amounts of intrusive data can lead to regulation, possibly intrusive. An (extreme) example of this is in 1984, where the data collect Oceania does (i.e., telescreens) allows them to control the population.