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Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

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Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#1

Post by enraged_camel »

My girlfriend came to check out some open houses with me yesterday after work. By 10 PM, she was seeing ads on Instagram for new houses. She hasn't shopped for a house before, or even done any searches on Google on that topic. I simply invited her to come with me and she did.

Similarly, we were at her place the other day and watched a kung fu movie on my laptop (connected to her wifi), and then went to bed. The next morning she started seeing ads for martial arts schools in the area.

What is happening?

She doesn't have an Amazon Echo or anything else that might be listening, although she does have an Android phone. She most likely has the default (stock) settings and apps. Regardless, I want to help her improve her privacy. What steps should I take (other than installing ad-blockers on her phone)?

Corollary: Is this what the Internet is like for "regular" people? If so, holy shit. I'm glad I use uBlock Origin on my computers and an iPhone.

Re: Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#2

Post by JPLeRouzic »

I am not in this field and I believe some guys here already explained it much clearly than me.

1. Checking Open houses: Many apps are authorized by most users to access their location. Ads space providers qualify their data, that is the way they earn their life. Then if one Ad client works in real estate, the Ads space, sorry your girlfriend phone screen, is a nice target for real estate Ads.

2. Kung fu ads: A Ads space provider for some of the ads may have noticed that several different user agents come from the same IP adress, so it inferred incorrectly that they belong to the same person.

Re: Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#3

Post by yongjik »

> Is this what the Internet is like for "regular" people? If so, holy shit. I'm glad I use uBlock Origin on my computers and an iPhone.

Somewhere, in a dark corner in a AWS datacenter in Oregon, some third-party tracking software records "Hey, the only user within five-mile radius that blocks our ad links just finished watching a kung fu movie."

Re: Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#4

Post by aylmao »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #2

I am not in this field and I believe some guys here already explained it much clearly than me. 1. Checking Open houses: Many apps are authorized by most users to access their location. Ads space providers qualify their data, that is the way they earn their life. Then if one Ad client works in real estate, the Ads space, sorry your girlfriend phone screen, is a nice target for real estate Ads. 2. Kung fu ads: A Ads sp…

^ Probably correct, +1.

I'd like to add that Android by default tracks your location constantly [1]. I recently got a Pixel and was staying in a hotel. Every night I came back to the hotel room it would ask me to rate it or upload pictures of it to Google Maps. It can be disabled in Settings, iirc.

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?pb

Re: Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#5

Post by dictum »

yongjik wrote: post #3

> Is this what the Internet is like for "regular" people? If so, holy shit. I'm glad I use uBlock Origin on my computers and an iPhone. Somewhere, in a dark corner in a AWS datacenter in Oregon, some third-party tracking software records "Hey, the only user within five-mile radius that blocks our ad links just finished watching a kung fu movie."

If you're going to get fingerprinted anyway, might as well save the bandwidth.

Re: Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#6

Post by danso »

Besides ad-blockers, turn off location tracking in apps. I forgot how it is for Android, but in iOS you can disable location tracking on an app-by-app basis. And you can also partially disable it -- only allow it when the app is active, as opposed to background tracking.

Re: Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#7

Post by jvalencia »

It seems to me as though this is the exact reason that Zuck was called in to testify. We have a reasonable understanding and can at least comment intelligently, but the public sees this, and clearly calls fowl. Being unable to stop it, they demand action from their senators. There's a reckoning coming I reckon --- it reminds me of GDPR in Europe.

Re: Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#8

Post by birdmanjeremy »

It could just be targeting. While it's possible something nefarious is going on, advertisers are really good at using available data to predict information that was never provided. In the case of the kung fu movie, it's possible IP address was used. For the open house, there could be some location correlation, but I would bet it's more than that (age, financial profile, relationship status). You can feed a bunch of data about someone to an algorithm and predict these things with pretty high confidence.

The way to avoid this is to opt out of interest based ads. iOS and Android both have options for this.

Re: Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?

#9

Post by waylandsmithers »

My guess would be:

1) Facebook (ie instagram) knows you are in a relationship

2) Facebook knows girlfriend's location from being signed in (on Instagram)

3) Facebook knows locations are at open houses from data gathered from other users or around the web. Or maybe Facebook knows that going to a few totally new random residential locations in a short period of time, combined with girlfriend's other engagement activities means user is looking for a new place to live.

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