101–110 of 131 posts
If you want to know what advertisers are retargeting you, you might want to check: http://whoisretargeting.me It can be enlightening. You can also opt out of a lot of it here: https://www.facebook.com/help/568137493302217
Well, I guess ad companies have no idea how much money I make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But... what about step 2? > Like a building full of PhD's advanced. On a more serious note, it's unfortunate that so many smart people use their intelligence to enable this kind of gross technology. It's all about "solving puzzles" rather than making the world a better place. There's gotta be more productive ways to advance your career.
I completely agree. I pity those PhD's using their Intellect for increasing Ad revenues to FB rather than creating/using algos to solve the pressing real-world problems - Diseases, Nutrition,Drought predictions,Curb terrorism etc. Are they even motivated by what they are doing..after all money is not everything (I agree FB pays a bomb).
Amazon has a Facebook retargeting pixel loaded which identifies you based on your (probably logged in but quite possibly not) Facebook account. Facebook has you IDed across browsers and across devices, getting around the single browser limitations cookies usually have. This links back to your FB account. Best practice would be for advertisers to also load a 'burn' pixel on a conversion page which lets them know you h…
Amazon has a Facebook retargeting pixel loaded which identifies you based on your (probably logged in but quite possibly not) Facebook account. Facebook has you IDed across browsers and across devices, getting around the single browser limitations cookies usually have. This links back to your FB account. Best practice would be for advertisers to also load a 'burn' pixel on a conversion page which lets them know you h…
/* DSP - Demand side partner (Entity which works with someone who wants to show their ads) SSP - Supply side partner (Entity which works with some who have potential space on web to show ads) /
1. When you visited Amazon.com, one of the DSP associated with them drop a cookie on your system to uniquely identify you as a user. Let's call it cookiexyz. 2. When you end up on Facebook.com, their SSP also drops a cookie on you, let's call it cookieabc. 3. Now only thing remaining is to determine cookiexyz and cookieabc are same users. 4. To do that, SSP requests a bid from Amazon's DSP(among others). While doing that, it calls one of the DSP's url(bid tag) which sends cookiexyz in request headers and sends cookieabc in query params. This uniquely profiles the user which DSP stores in their system and next time user requests a bid again, they can serve them ads based on preferences based on cookiexyz. In other words, info that your looked at some shoes on Amazon.com
/ disclaimer: I work as a dev in one of the Advertising partner for Yahoo and Bing. */
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The banality of evil. So many engineers just want to make the trains run on time with a better algorithm. Never mind that they cary oil or weapons or the victims of our next genocide. Engrossing technical problems are convenient blinders for inconvenient truths.
You can't tell in advance what trains, in general, will carry. When writing ad targeting code, user surveillance, nuclear missile guidance, VW pollution test circumvention code... you know exactly what is going on.
This is all fairly straight forward however, what blows my mind is Facebook makes recommendations of friends that I've NEVER had any digital interaction with. For some reason it picked up the kid who stocks the craft beer at my local family run grocer. Literally only talked to the kid face-to-face. No phone number, no texting, no contact entry (not that I share those with Facebook anyways). That made the hair on the…
On a related note, I had a weird experience where I was talking about a trip to Vietnam with my friends. A few hours later, I saw an ad for air travel to Vietnam on my FB page. Now I'm 100% sure I hadn't googled or searched for Vietnam previously. At first, the conspiracy theorist inside said "they're listening!" through my phone microphone or whatever. But then, I thought, could they have been forming a pattern of m…
Amazon has a Facebook retargeting pixel loaded which identifies you based on your (probably logged in but quite possibly not) Facebook account. Facebook has you IDed across browsers and across devices, getting around the single browser limitations cookies usually have. This links back to your FB account. Best practice would be for advertisers to also load a 'burn' pixel on a conversion page which lets them know you h…
It's worth noting that according to this study[1], Facebook has trackers on 25% of the top 1 million websites (Google is top with 75%). This doesn't immediately explain how they get around the use of separate browsers, but with device fingerprinting techniques, e.g. checking the list of installed fonts, screen size, IP address, etc., I'm sure they can reach a high probability of recognising a single user. [1] https:/…
Facebook and Google will make use of probabilistic device fingerprinting techniques etc, but to nowhere near the same extent that a company would that didn't have FB/Google's level of logged in data.
