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Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

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Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#51

Post by _Understated_ »

jpollock wrote: post #50
move-on-by wrote: post #45

There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them. Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments,…

Blocking ads won't stop your info from being shared during the auction. That's a back end data transfer.

That's true but it will really limit what information they can gather from you in the first place.

For example, the article mentions they knew about browsing habits but that wouldn't be the case if they couldn't see you.

I suppose it comes down to "we have the data, so let's use it"... we need to stop the mass-gathering in the first place then these "bugs" are meaningless.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#52

Post by maximente »

dangero wrote: post #25
DarwinMailApp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your point as I can relate to that opinion. However my outlook has changed in the last year or so. There has been several occasions where my conversation somehow turned into relevant web ads. I don't think I'm making a mistake here. A friend of mine told me of his good friend who left Amazon recently as his job was to listen to what users say to Alexa and ensure Alexa responded correctly. FYI that's both when…

Alexa does not send data unless you say “Alexa”. This happens at a hardware level. This is confirmed by hardware schematics and by security researchers who have sifted through every piece of data that leaves the device. What you are saying isn’t true. It cannot be.

the device can't magically detect the world Alexa - there is some lossy process of translating incoming noise into a vector that has some probability of being the hotword, and above this probability the device enables.

a more accurate thing to say would be:

Alexa does not send data unless, in the course of listening for the hotword Alexa, it interprets some noise or utterance to be close enough to Alexa to start sending data

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#53

Post by move-on-by »

jpollock wrote: post #50
move-on-by wrote: post #45

There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them. Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments,…

Blocking ads won't stop your info from being shared during the auction. That's a back end data transfer.

You are correct, that is why I point out that regulation is the solution. Blocking what ads we can in the mean time is just a small way we - as unwilling users - can show that we are are unhappy with the way things currently are.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#54

Post by spunker540 »

jerf wrote: post #37
b_tterc_p wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I would assume your entire social network is well documented. A lot of conversations include one person looking something up before or after the conversation. Most conversations don’t come up randomly. That can probably signal that you might be interested in such a topic too. For 2) it’s worth noting that when you say you didn’t say Alexa, it means Alexa at least thought you did. It’s not trying to constantly reco…

I've been keeping my eye out for good, solid proof that these assistants are doing ad-based targeting based on things being overheard, but I haven't found anything despite looking, and the arguments they aren't are reasonably compelling. (The people looking are quite motivated to find it. Big feather in their hat if they do and can even convincingly cast shade on Amazon, let alone prove it.) My conclusion is that the…

People have dozens of conversations every day that don’t match with the hundreds of ads they see every day. But then once or twice coincidentally a conversation preceded a relevant ad and the user jumps to the conclusion that their conversation was being listened to without noticing that 99.9% of the time the ads have nothing to do with any topic of conversation. Its occam’s razor or confirmation bias or some other phenomena HN likes to point out.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#55

Post by driverdan »

There's a way to nearly eliminate all Twitter ads from your feeds. Whenever you see one tap / click the drop down arrow on the top right of it and select "I don't like this ad."

After you do it enough Twitter will drastically reduce the volume of ads it shows you. I see one every day or two and it's usually Twitter's "you've been selected to fill out a survey" ad.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#56

Post by dhimes »

cameronbrown wrote: post #44
skocznymroczny wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. If this technology is so pervasive and supposedly efficient, why do I always get such terrible ads, completely irrelevant to my interests? Usually the only targeted ads I get are ads for products I was searching for to buy, but usually they show up after I bought the product, so, no, I am not going to buy a new fridge within few years anyway.

There's a lot of wasted inventory yeah, but conversion rates are still much higher than they would've been without targeting. It looks terrible from the individual's point of view but from on high it seems to work well enough.

By conversion rates, do you mean clicks or sales? The CTR industry (and by that I mean people who "optimize" landing pages and ads) count clicks- but as the person paying for it I count sales and don't care about clicks.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#57

Post by lostlogin »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #40
tictoc wrote: post #38

Here's an idea. Stop using twitter.

You don't need to use Twitter (or Facebook, google, etc) for them to collect your data. Any site with a Twitter embed, a FB Like button, and/or Google Analytics will gather and process your data.

You can block that, though I’m sure some gets through. Pihole and an add blocker work pretty well for me, and it’s really surprising to me that people tolerate browsing without some form of protection.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#58

Post by dmoy »

dhimes wrote: post #56
cameronbrown wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of wasted inventory yeah, but conversion rates are still much higher than they would've been without targeting. It looks terrible from the individual's point of view but from on high it seems to work well enough.

By conversion rates, do you mean clicks or sales? The CTR industry (and by that I mean people who "optimize" landing pages and ads) count clicks- but as the person paying for it I count sales and don't care about clicks.

Conversion means whatever the end company wants it to mean. If it's mass retail that probably means sales (like in dollar value or whatever). If it's something else it might mean account creation. If it's a very high touch sales thing it might mean initiating contact with a human sales person. And yes, it might mean clicking through to a specific part of the website (account creation is a subset of this).

Part of a successful as campaign has to be defining your metrics correctly. The closer to your actual end business goal, the more realistic your performance tracking is.

Etc etc

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#59

Post by 52-6F-62 »

lostlogin wrote: post #57
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to use Twitter (or Facebook, google, etc) for them to collect your data. Any site with a Twitter embed, a FB Like button, and/or Google Analytics will gather and process your data.

You can block that, though I’m sure some gets through. Pihole and an add blocker work pretty well for me, and it’s really surprising to me that people tolerate browsing without some form of protection.

I use the DDG extension for Firefox and it does a decent job as well. It regularly catches Google's and FB's trackers for me.

Re: Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks

#60

Post by celticmusic »

move-on-by wrote: post #45

There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them. Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments,…

I'm an american who is not on twitter.

We have these things called news outlets, newspapers, and so forth. Apparently these places take an interest in what the president does. weird, I know...

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