These are two companies.
186Who sell you as a consumer to vast ad agencies and make a profit off your doom scrolling.
26Not quite, these two are the vast ad agencies.
12nope. 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
3
We are lucky to still have 2 choices
20
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.
83Please, 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.
37And yet they can’t recommend a song that I would actually like.
11then 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_lY11The 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.
7Here 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.
7
There was the incident of Target or some store realizing someone was pregnant before they did themselves, which seems relevant here.
11Yes! 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.
13Low income, less than high school education, late teens, living in the deep south, buying pickles in bulk from Costco... Survey says: prèganté
11
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.3My dumbass reread this comment 3 times before I realized you weren’t looking into buying trailers
1
This is such a fucking dumb comment lol.
-2Google 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" ?
-3Dumb take is dumb
-3
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.
71Even 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.
45Even 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.
7that'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.
3
What would you use for apps like discord and whatsapp?
3yeah, 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.
2
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.
29I 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
9That'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.
5So.... Did you end up buying 100,000 totes like that other guy? Seeing that your mutual interests are large generic storage totes.
1
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...
26One 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.
25The 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.
15I 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. 🤨
11Similar 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
8
Also apple watching through the window and having "exclusive" rights to sell the same data.
12Uninstall Facebook, install AeroInsta and YouTube Revanced, and use DuckDuckGo
8does 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)1AeroInsta 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.
2
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.
3I'm glad we meet here, on the fediverse 👍
3Wasting multiple options by repeating both companies twice...
3One 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
3If 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
2I wonder if I can skew statistics or my gender assumption if I mention or search up stuff the opposite way.. worth a try.
1Glad I left all BT behind , just WhatsApp left...
1To be honest even after listening to all shits, they suggest me stupid things which I don't even care about.
1So many of you are on Lemmy and have ZERO privacy awareness. Gtfo please and leave the actual techies alone.
This isn't "hopeless" you fuckers. DuckDuckGo how to protect yourself from things like this photo.
-8
