441–450 of 473 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also has to be a topic that advertisers would pay to target you with. You can't talk about something super obscure that advertisers don't care about - like steam engines.
Thanks for this!! Now my email is full of offers to buy historical steam engines, steam engine parts, and engineer hats. Amazon is even advertising a subscription for coal deliveries!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The control is the topic you pick that you don’t discuss on WhatsApp or messenger. The idea is random differences between topics should average out over many trials.
I still think it’s important to consider the volume of topics that show up that aren’t being explicitly looked for. I’ve gotten Instagram ads for ketamine and I absolutely am not discussing or searching for it. I probably wouldn’t even notice a random topic if it’s not so absurd. I’m sure there’s tons of topics I don’t even realize I see.
I think you partly may just be biased by happening to notice ads more if they fit the topic you sent to your wife or being lenient in deciding if ads meet the categorization. And if you dwell on an ad because it seems to match, you may get more similar ads. Here is how I think you could design a more robust (but less fun) experiment: - Come up with a bunch of topics, write them down on slips of paper, put the paper i…
There will be some bias in what they choose to screenshot right? Meaning, the unrelated topic might show up in the feed but they don’t screenshot it because it doesn’t fit the narrative? Also, what we’re interested is if the text changed what was shown. If I saw ads for X last week but didn’t notice them, then spoke to a friend and noticed them and took a screenshot, it would appear to confirm the theory. Even though…
I think you partly may just be biased by happening to notice ads more if they fit the topic you sent to your wife or being lenient in deciding if ads meet the categorization. And if you dwell on an ad because it seems to match, you may get more similar ads. Here is how I think you could design a more robust (but less fun) experiment: - Come up with a bunch of topics, write them down on slips of paper, put the paper i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most plausible explanation is that people are just easy to predict. Might be tough to admit, but that’s actually a much simpler explanation than Facebook having a back door into our messages, which are end-to-end encrypted. As others above me have thoroughly explained, there are numerous ways Facebook could figure out what you’re reading about/listening to/viewing on the internet, which ultimately drives what you…
Seriously? Facebook knows their internal thoughts well enough to guess what topics they would choose when trying to pick something they "never talk about"? If FB could do that, then FB would realize that these topics are not actually products they are interested in, so they wouldn't be showing ads.
Facebook show (many people) a lot of ads and they only need to get lucky a few times for you to think it’s uncanny. All the non-unique times an ad was not relevant will have blurred together and so you won’t easily remember that they were the vast majority of the ads you see. A little bit of feedback (eg if you dwell on the coincidental ad) may cause you to see more related ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smart TVs in general use IP address to try target devices across households, which is against the privacy policies of a lot of ad tech providers because IPs are not redactable/resettable by an end-user. The best way for small ad tech providers to compete with "big tech" has been to cross lines that the bigger companies won't cross, this is an example for why there are a lot of profitable ad tech companies in the conn…
The first thing I did when helping my parents set up their new LG OLED TV's at xmas was to disable all the ads and tracking. It's exhausting how much pressure they put on you to opt-in, and how many layers there are, constantly implying the TV will be nonfunctional without it. But sure enough, it works just fine with no ads, no "free tv channels", and no voice functionality.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These kind of stories are always fun to analyze using the Socratic method. -How did you learn about the product? -Have you ever searched for it? -Did a friend of yours tell you about it? Do you think they searched for it? -Are a lot of ads for it playing on TV channels you like? Could instagram know you like those TV channels? -Is it something your neighbors got? Do you think there has been a spike in shipments of th…
I also have a theory that sometimes when people say "we were talking about and I never even typed it into my phone or anything, and suddenly I started seeing ads for it the next day!" that the person in the story may not have looked up , but someone else in the conversation might have Googled it or browsed an Amazon listing or something and they have some kind of connection in their ad profiles whether it be that the…
We know our phones commonly listen for "smart assistant" prompts and audio beacons (https://www.nanalyze.com/2017/05/audio-beacons-monitor-smart...), so they don't seem to have any trouble abusing the mic access. Honestly without a whistleblower, there's little hope of really understanding how much data a company collects and what they use it for. At least sometimes we can see it in their own marketing materials. For example, https://advertising.roku.com/resources/blog/insights-analysi... tells us:
"Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching."
None of the people I know who use those devices knew that was happening, but the info was out there at least. When so many people are watching everything you see and do and say who can ever know what every company is doing or what the source of any one ad is?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first thing I did when helping my parents set up their new LG OLED TV's at xmas was to disable all the ads and tracking. It's exhausting how much pressure they put on you to opt-in, and how many layers there are, constantly implying the TV will be nonfunctional without it. But sure enough, it works just fine with no ads, no "free tv channels", and no voice functionality.
Have you ever checked back to see if updates had re-enabled some of those or introduced new ones? You'd hope they'd let you know if they started getting ads all the time, but the tracking stuff is much less obvious.
We have an LG tv and one of my family members hit accept all after an update and now my remote listens to us. To fix this properly I would need to factory reset which loses all of our streaming settings. I actually don’t because I have a separate ISP only for our TVs so there’s a bit of separation between our streaming use and phone activity