These are two companies.
Who sell you as a consumer to vast ad agencies and make a profit off your doom scrolling.
Not quite, these two are the vast ad agencies.
nope. they do all the tracking and manipulation themselves. selling to other ad agencies would allow said other agencies to compete and they don’t want that.
they might share data between each other though, we can’t really prove they don’t
We are lucky to still have 2 choices
Here’s the fun part, they don’t need to listen to you. You are far more predictable than you realize. They already know everything about you, what you search, what apps you use, what kinds of exercise you do and when, what you eat, what articles you read, movies and podcasts you consume, music you listen to, what you buy, where you go, who you hang out with, and everything about the people you hang out with. Every minute of your life is meticulously tracked and analyzed and compared to the hundred thousand people who are just like you in terms of interests and patterns. They can predict to a scary degree what your thinking before you might even realize it yourself. They know you better than you know yourself. Why waste the resources sifting through hours of recordings when they already know everything going on in your head from the million data points you voluntarily transmit to them everyday?
The other part of this to keep in mind is that you are bombarded with ads all day most of which you ignore. It’s just that those few times where they manage to hit a straight bullseye, showing you an add for something you were just talking about or even just thinking about, those are the ones that will stick in your memory.
Please, please, please, can people just understand this?! It’s infuriating hearing all these conspiracies when in reality, it’s so much simpler to just use the data we already know they collect.
It’s also frankly scarier that they can predict our thoughts, patterns, movements etc. without the need to listen to us at all. That scares the shit out of me.
It’s not really all that crazy to think though. We create categories for people in our own heads and predict their behavior all the time. Often times we get it right because people are at least somewhat predictable. Look no further than starter pack memes.
If you an average male into video games it’s going to shill you popular video games. That’s an assumption given your gender and age and probably location and most of the time it’s a correct choice. It’s not as advanced as you think it is.
Nah, none of this explains the Lemonbalm Tea incident.
I assure you, the Lemonbalm Tea incident does not require further explanation than “whatever many steps you think is the answer, you can add plus 2 to it and still come up short”.
There is no “lemon balm incident” that even bears worth putting on the Internet after a quick google search. You’re talking out your ass so can it.
I cannot replicate any of these claims no matter how hard I try. I ran out of contact solution this weekend and I spent a good 20 minutes repeating the words “contact solution” “contact solution delivery” “1-800-contacts” "I need contact solution " with Facebook open, directly into the microphone. All I get are vaguely relevant ads for shit I obviously would want (bike parts and bikes because, spoiler alert, I use FB almost exclusively to keep up with local mountain bike events) and absolutely nothing about contacts or contact solution.
But guess what? This still doesn’t prove anything because, like your example, it’s an anecdote. And a single anecdote counts for fuck all in terms of evidence. I find it exceedingly unlikely that any of the tech giants are wasting time and resources listening in on our conversations simply to target us with advertisements when they already have sufficient data based on past search history, app usage statistics, our friend groups, location data, demographic data, …
This stupid conspiracy is just as illogical as the vaccine tracking chip conspiracy. Hello, you are voluntarily carrying a tracking device you bought with your own money and keep charged with your own power, and you willingly expose even more data to it like private messages and photos. There’s absolutely no reason to invent GPS tracking nano technology to solve an already solved problem.
And I by no means am saying that these big tech companies are innocent or that they don’t abuse the data they collect. There’s a 100% chance they do. But you are ascribing a level of sophistication they don’t really need to “read your mind” or listen in on your private conversations. You are human, and they have a few billion other examples of humans they can use to analyze behavior. We’re pretty predictable, it turns out.
There was the incident of Target or some store realizing someone was pregnant before they did themselves, which seems relevant here.
Yes! I was going to mention that, I heard about that years ago, so things have to be way more sophisticated now. Just looked it up the story was from 2012, and target was just tracking credit card numbers and noticing when women started buying things like unscented lotion. So this is waaay less sophisticated then the information companies are sucking up in present day.
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?sh=75e6dd266668 The story I found was a girl who got a target mailer for pregnancy stuff and her dad was pissed, only to find out later that his daughter was im fact pregnant. Target changed tactics, instead of sending mailers with just baby stuff, they start sending personalized mailers with some baby stuff mixed in, increasing as the due date approaches. And again this was 11 years ago and just used credit card information and target purchase data. It’s wild to think of what they can do now.
Low income, less than high school education, late teens, living in the deep south, buying pickles in bulk from Costco… Survey says: prèganté
And yet they can’t recommend a song that I would actually like.
then how do you explain facebook giving people ads for stuff they say
eg. this youtuber made an experiment where he wasn’t getting ads for oven and when he started saying oven multiple times, he got ads for oven https://youtu.be/-nkiPEGU_lYOr Facebook recommending people that I’ve talked to by text and never met irl (met on dating app, moved to text, fizzled out) when it’s not supposed to have access to my contacts.
Yeah but Facebook probably has access to the other person’s contacts where your name and phone number were stored
That’s a good point. She popped up after she changed my contact info to my new name, which I updated on FB a few weeks ago.
Though it did happen with another girl I was talking to last year and haven’t talked to since.
Assuming this isn’t because the person you’re contacting has lax privacy set up in their FB account, have you ever played “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon”? You (I assume) probably live near this person, are probably approximately the same age, single, you may even have some obscure friends in common. Or friends of friends. And what you don’t remember are the countless recommendations that are totally off base. For every “uncanny” friend recommendation I get, there are dozens of people I don’t know.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/-nkiPEGU_lY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
The video you linked would be stupid easy to reproduce by recording a voice over after scrolling ads on Facebook for a minute. If you want to convince me, you would need to perform a controlled experiment with multiple unrelated search terms, fresh Facebook accounts with no browsing history, etc.
Or, what if this is real? Maybe the YouTuber wasn’t just phishing for view counts with clickbait to boost his channel and actually did make that video in good faith and sure enough, Bluetooth speakers show up in his feed? What’s to say he hasn’t been seeing Bluetooth speaker ads because he’s a tech inclined, middle aged man with disposable income and the opposite effect is true: maybe he subconsciously chose Bluetooth speakers because he’s been seeing ads for them on Facebook recently? Our minds aren’t exactly good at keeping track of that kind of thing and advertisers take advantage of that shit all the time. Look at the familiarity principle or mere exposure effect.
My point isn’t to say Facebook and Google don’t collect tons of data about us, they do that all the time for sure. It’s just that there are simpler, more reliable and less processor intensive ways to build a behavioral model. Google knows where I work, what I search for, how old I am, how many kids I have, what YouTube videos I watch, … There’s more than enough there to figure out what kind of ads to serve me.
But I don’t see any ads. I use ublock on PC and mobile. I use only lemmy and mastodon and I have multiple apps to watch youtube ad free.
Well, I should probably say that the ads I do see, I see voluntarily. Like trailers for instance.My dumbass reread this comment 3 times before I realized you weren’t looking into buying trailers
This is such a fucking dumb comment lol.
Google offers free voice to text engine APIs and constantly listens on your phone for “hello google” or however their phrase goes. So if it is constantly listenning to you anyways, why not also filter for other keywords like “buy” “like” “want” ?
Dumb take is dumb
Why are some of you STILL not using ad, tracker, and script blockers in 2023? This is basic internet shit. Wear protection and stop rawdogging it.
Even with all that disabled there are still ghost profiles of you built. If you shop online at all you are building a fingerprint without the need of trackers.
Even then, you should use adblockers to stop giving them money. Modern day social media is just targeted advertising, that is why they profile you. If you don’t see ads, that information is useless to them.
that’s why i do everything that’s transactional in an incognito window. i have plenty of non-incognito tabs but they’re nearly all sites i log into on the regular such as lemmy. combine that with firefox’s built-in privacy protections and ublock origin, which is a combo that absolutely wrecks a lot of tracking and browser fingerprinting scripts to begin with (i have actually done contract work for marketing communications people and it was crazy how many layers of defense i needed to peel back just to debug their shit) and most of that tracking becomes disjointed cookies that only span a single session each and are hella hard to correlate.
Incognito window doesn’t do what you think it does. Also it doesn’t stop browser fingerprinting, even tor itself doesn’t really take a win there.
yeah, the thing that stops browser fingerprinting on the threat level of ad companies is firefox’s built-in protections (which are in fact stronger in incognito) and ublock origin; and umatrix, full script blocking, and probably prayers on tor’s level.
what incognito does is it breaks apart your chain of regular cookies. those can still slip through a lot of these tools, especially when they’re first-party, but they’re also kinda low-tech because of being first party most of the time (while the third party ones are easily blocked by other tools). that way the trace you leave behind is not one long thing, but many small ones that are hard to connect.
incognito is just one layer of defense but it’s an important one
Don’t container tabs and FPI offer superior cookie tracking resistance?
With fingerprinting they developed new ways to find unique browsers by detecting how you render specific canvas elements and being able to unique identify you based on that since it’s dependent on hardware, browser, OS etc… You can’t really do anything about that. From what I’ve seen. That with other techniques gives a unique fingerpint for you even with Tor which standardizes as much information about you as possible to keep you in that large group of users so you are harder to identify.
Maybe Librewolf does a better job? Brave in my experience also didn’t do any better than tor.
Container tabs are great for shit you log into, because they’re like having a bunch of different, isolated browsers. For example, even if there was a YouTube embed here (which I haven’t seen on Lemmy yet) it wouldn’t be able to correlate those views to my account because I’m logged in in a different tab, from the way Google sees it it could be anyone on my network. Incognito is similar to that in that you grab a new browser every time and discard it whenever you close the last tab. It’s great for transactional stuff, but a little inconvenient for stuff you want to keep logged into, which is where container tabs are great.
And yeah, there are some hella strong fingerprinting techniques, but no one is reimplementing any of those for advertising reasons. They just pull in a script from an ad company, which gets promptly blocked by uBlock Origin. If you use Tor and want to do some stuff that you really need to hide your identity for, you might run into some more advanced attempts to track you.
What would you use for apps like discord and whatsapp?
yeah, well my phone might have it, but phones and other gadgets around me are still listening. ad they can track who is with who, so surely these measures aren’t fool proof. if these measures were adopted universally it will be most effective, but unfortunately it is not.
I just did some volunteer work to help some flood wreckage.
We were using these generic ass storage totes to package shit up in and help people move out or whatever.
Me and like 5 other people all had ads for the generic totes.
I figure it was like "YO THAT GUY THAT BOUGHT 100,000 TOTES IS HANGING OUT WITH THESE GUYS, MAYBE THEY WANT 100,000 TOTES TOO??!
anyways welcome to the future it sucks.
I like how I bought a vacuum months ago and everything keeps advertising them at me. I already got one! How many damn vacuums do you people think someone needs? Because the answer is almost never more than one. If they’re collecting my data they should also be well aware that there’s no way in hell I’m dropping $1k on a Dyson lmao
That’s hilarious, but more than likely that’s exactly what happened. I listened to someone explain the process on a podcast recently, can’t remember which one maybe the Vergecast or vox today explained. But the example they used is you go to a country club you hang out with a friend who just bought a Porsche or whatever. They use your phones location to know you are always going to this location and sticking within a few feet of this other phone, the owner of which has the new Porsche. Well they figure that’s your friend and he’s probably talking up his porche, and your in the right demographic to buy a Porsche and you haven’t bought a new car in x years, so guess what now you get Porsche ads. So what you described perfectly fits that example, they figured you’d all be suckers for some totes.
Shhhh!!! My husband still doesn’t know it’s my fault he’s been getting manga ads and I can’t make fun of him for having anime boyfriends if he finds out. Even worse. He’ll be in a position to make fun of me AND he’ll get to be smug about it. This is my life hanging in the balance here 🥺
You sit on a teetering throne of lies!
So… Did you end up buying 100,000 totes like that other guy? Seeing that your mutual interests are large generic storage totes.
NGL this is driving me crazy. Without searching for things, just talking about them, they start showing up in ads. Even in places that don’t have google/alexa speakers.
At this point, I’m reaching full-tinfoil and think they have a voice chip installed under my skinl…
One time I was in a car with some people, and the clouds looked really nice, and out loud I said “I wonder what kind of clouds those are? Are they like cumulus? I don’t even know all the types of clouds” or something along those lines. About a minute later, I take my phone out to look it up and I type “What kind of” and the google auto-fill was “clouds are those” and I was like "There’s absolutely no way that my phone is not listening to me at all times. I do not believe for one second that the most popular search is “What kind of clouds are those”. That was very very specific to what I had just said out loud.
I’m usually not one for tinfoil hats, but this is very difficult to explain.
The most likely situation is that it used the GPS data that it scrapes from you to recognize you’re in a car. Then uses their internal knowledge to know that most of the time when other users are in cars and Google “what kind of” they are asking about clouds.
Still hoovering up way too much personal data.
Or that people around had already been googling this question very recently.
Yeah it’s definitely just regional popular searches for this situation
I remember somewhere, I believe it was the congressional hearings where they called all the heads of the biggest companies to testify for something…a couple years ago…when Bozos refused to show.
Well, anyways, a congressman asked Zuckerberg why this happens because he doesn’t appreciate them listening, through his phone microphone, to conversations hes having. Zuck replies that the algorithm knows you so well, that it pretty much predicts what your going to say at the exact time you say it…were definitely not listening to you from your phone speaker, he says, thats technology we just dont have.
Or something to that effect. 🤨
There are always a lot of reasons to see what we see on ads and suggestions without them having to listen to us. Try to do the test and talk about something completely random to you around your phone. Chances are you’ll never get ads about it.
The algorithms are based on so many criterias and are so freaking good that it seems like the simplest answer is to listen to us. But with GPS, relationships, history, habits, emails/sms/messages, etc. it can be freaky how good the predictions can be. They are already “listening” in so many ways that are cheap to do, constant audio streaming is absolutely not cheap and not required.Way too many people in this thread need to read up on cognitive biases. Frequency illusion would be a good place to start.
I once stopped in a gas station to get coffee, and instead of using brand names to refer to the sweetener, they used the colors: “yellow sweetener” for splenda, “blue sweetener” for equal, etc. It was weird to me, so I noticed. Later that day, I was on my flight and ordered coffee, and the flight attendant offered the sweetener using the same color coding instead of brand names. Weird, right? Then after I got to my destination, at the hotel, same thing!
The only logical conclusion isn’t that our brains are wierd and stuff like this happens as a result of the way we categorize and remember information, but instead that I am in a Meta simulation and Zuckerberg is reading my thoughts.
Yeah. Only a Senator would be dumb enough to realize individualized predictive AI is harder tech than voice recognition.
Is it though?
And that was over ten years ago. This stuff has only got better since then. I don’t believe they need to listen in to get scary levels of information from you. More than enough to make people convinced they’re listening like some kind of Batman shit.
Oh I followed that one, too.
The thing is, unless there’s a great breakthrough, individual behavior is dramatically less predictable than mob behavior. The Target algorithm was a great case study, but they sent those ads/coupons to EVERYONE who fit the algorithm, and much of the time they were EITHER right OR wrong. Target dropped that particular style of campaign because it had too low a match rate (hitting too many non-pregnant folks and missing too many pregnant ones). When it had that “shocking success”, was it truly a great moment for predictive AI’s, or just the chips falling right with the AI simply adjusting odds a bit?
But no, the predictive technology is harder; I say that as someone who has worked in a predictive data science division. The tuning required to make a model work better than control is hard. Ultimately, if you get ads for something you’ve never searched for before the same day you SAY you want that something, it’s the voice recognition. I’ll be clear, most models we’d work on would fail to prove themselves, get thrown out, and be picked up again. If we’d had the abililty to buy voice matches for the word “insurance” from Amazon/Google, we have been in bloody paradise.
“Oh, you wanted me to make a soda fizz, right? We should get St. Germain because that’s good in it.” … starts getting St. Germain commercials every 5 minutes. Didn’t even know they had commercials. Fucking St. Germain.
EDIT: And I have tested it. Came up with stupid things to say in front of speakers a few times, and some have definitely shown up in really bizarre TV ads. I get it, I know why Chewy is advertising to me. But what about the Plant Based Burger commercials I got in a sudden storm for a month? I’m a meat-lover, but decided to talk about plant-based burgers in my living room where the speaker is.
Similar story with me. In my car with my friends. I have never listened to Bob Marley, nor his genre of music. I have never had a reason to look him up. Anyways, through or random conversations, we got to talking about him and wondering how he died. We came up with a few theories before I decided to grab my phone and Google it. I literally just pressed ‘H’ and wouldn’t you know it, the first suggestion was “How did Bob Marley die?” Needless to say I was creeped the fuck out after that
Also apple watching through the window and having “exclusive” rights to sell the same data.
Uninstall Facebook, install AeroInsta and YouTube Revanced, and use DuckDuckGo
Is there a app like AeroInsta but just for Facebook Marketplace? Where I live, it’s the only way people sell used things
How often do you use it? I’d just use a browser if possible
Unfortunately I need it daily for work ;/
I’d love an alternative, but… You know. Gotta pay the bills and share my life with the zuck
That’s why I don’t delete my account. It’s thankfully rare anymore but I have to use it for ad reports occasionally
I absolutely despise FB marketplace around here, it’s full of scams and stolen goods
In my area it’s good, the only problem is that it’s the only way to found used things here
does aeroinsta and revanced make any privacy improvements?
I’d say to use newpipe for youtube as it is better for privacy(uses youtube scraping instead of official api so youtube gets minimal telemetry back from you) and insta lite as it is focused on cheap phones so it probably has less trackers for smoothness
also they aren’t as visually pleasing so you won’t be addicted to doomscrolling (instsagram lite on purpose shows you only posts from last 3 days on your feed)AeroInsta outright blocks the trackers. I’ve never seen a search related content on Instagram because of it.
Revanced, alongside paused history and opt out of ad personalisation, keeps entire history to yourself.
Even YouTube on web can only recommend videos based on my subscription and nothing else.
I’m glad we meet here, on the fediverse 👍
I periodically say random product names or search for things id have no use for just to see how far and wide it goes…it’s bad.
Wasting multiple options by repeating both companies twice…
One time a buddy and I were talking about cars, a Toyota supra came up. I haven’t said that phrase since gran Turismo in the 90s. Ad the next day
If it was just that, it wouldn’t even bother me all that much. But we know it’s more than that and they still want way more
Glad I left all BT behind , just WhatsApp left…
To be honest even after listening to all shits, they suggest me stupid things which I don’t even care about.
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