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

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31–40 of 96 posts

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

#31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try Mark. Jokes aside, these issues are happening way too often for it to just be a coincidence. I've seen multiple friends and strangers, as well as myself, reporting that they were talking about something and then an ad shows up about that. EDIT: typo

Nice try? Read this first: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

No. You read this first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

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

#32
post #22

did you invite her to come see the open house by texting her "hey, wanna come see an open house"?

if you mean whatsapp, the content of messages is not available to whatsapp/facebook systems (it's end-to-end encrypted).

but they have the keys, and can't be trusted

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

#33
post #22

did you invite her to come see the open house by texting her "hey, wanna come see an open house"?

if you mean whatsapp, the content of messages is not available to whatsapp/facebook systems (it's end-to-end encrypted).

They could still extract keywords on the sender or recipient device and send them independently of the message; the message is still encrypted but keywords such as “buy” and “house” were submitted to Facebook anyway.

I don’t buy the “end to end encryption” argument. If the app used encryption for the benefit of their users it would absolutely make no sense for Facebook to buy them for billions. The reason FB did so anyway is that they have a workaround the E2E encryption like described above.

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

#34

A totally plausible explanation for this (as plausible as any Amazon Echo passive speech recognition ad targeting theory) is that she's been seeing these ads for weeks, but they were completely irrelevant and her mind filtered them out until she happened to have house hunting / martial arts movies on her mind after these events.

I think you may be right. Many of these stories talk about users mentioning they would like X product. Then they are surprised when they get an ad for that product. They forget A. all the other times they talked about products and never saw an ad and B. all the other ads they saw without ever mentioning the product.

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

#35
post #10

Start by switching to iOS, then for each app she installs make sure location permissions are denied. On the laptop, make sure uBlock Origin is installed.

IP address is sort of equivalent to location.

Cellphone tower is similarly equivalent to location.

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

#36
post #13

Did either one of you login to amazon, Facebook, google, etc on one of the other persons device? If so there is likely still a tracking cookie associating you with her device. And your searches are causing her device to be targeted.

Even if you don't have cookies enabled, then browser fingerprinting could make the connection.

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

#37
This kind of "air-gap join" definitely happens based on my own experience. e.g. I get shown ads for products my kids are interested in, where I am sure I never interacted in any way online with the vendor. Also I had a /24 IP block and used some addresses for my neighbors' connections (different to our IP but within the same block). Neighbors reported seeing ads for products we bought. In fact we would joke about it, ask each other why we were seeing ads for xxx weird and unusual thing.

I'll guess that the following join keys could be used:

IP address or IP address subnet Physical location / postal address Known family or romantic relationship Offline key match such as use of the same credit card

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

#39
post #35
post #10

Start by switching to iOS, then for each app she installs make sure location permissions are denied. On the laptop, make sure uBlock Origin is installed.

IP address is sort of equivalent to location. Cellphone tower is similarly equivalent to location.

The IP can be used to correlate them being together (connected to their home WiFi), but would be unable to track them outside (unless the phones try to connect to “free” public WiFi which is subsidised by ads and will no doubt rat the users out to Facebook).

Cell phone towers don’t correlate to IPs at all; the IP layer is added way above all that at the GGSN in the carrier’s network, which doesn’t even know nor care which tower you’re connected to.

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

#40
post #22

did you invite her to come see the open house by texting her "hey, wanna come see an open house"?

if you mean whatsapp, the content of messages is not available to whatsapp/facebook systems (it's end-to-end encrypted).

Does WhatsApp make it clear what "end" means and how many so-called "ends" you are transmitting a message to?
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