We all have plenty of these types of examples-- we’ve just been talking about some subject, and suddenly we start getting internet ads about that very thing. Are our phones and Alexa devices listening to us? According to a Netflix doc on the subject a few years back, the answer was “they don’t need to listen to us”. An example was given-- a pregnant mom-to-be meets her friend in the park, who is a new mother, and new mom extolls the virtues of a stroller she just bought. Then mom-to-be starts getting ads for the stroller. Was their conversation overheard by an internet device? No, the companies that track the info already know that one is a new mom who bought the stroller and one is pregnant. They see through GPS tracking that they are in close proximity. So they serve mom-to-be the ad knowing that they likely did have the conversation, and she will be in the market for a stroller.
But, that was a few years ago. Now, with even more ubiquitous internet-connected listening devices and the advent of AI, they might be listening as well. But today I had an even more unexplainable thing happen. Tell me-- is it just coincidence? Am I getting paranoid?
So I WFH, and yesterday, I was at home alone, family were all away elsewhere, and made myself a tuna salad sandwich for lunch. It was a completely random decision arrived at from checking to see what we had to eat. I did not not talk or text to anybody what I had for lunch. The canned tuna I used had not been recently purchased.
I sometimes check out YouTube clips and shorts during Pomodoro-style breaks during the day. Of course, I’m very used to getting vids related to something I recently googled, or a SDMB thread subject I read or participated in. Well, this morning, I see I’m getting served a video for how to make NY deli-style tuna salad.
So, are they in my braaaiiin, man?!? I know, it could be pure coincidence. But something as random as a tuna salad recipe the day after I make it seems…suspect. Anyway, let me know whether you think I’m losing it or not, and share your creepy internet tracking experiences. Let the machine know we’re onto it!
My gf (in advertising) was doing some kind of presentation. Her laptop screen was projected onto a big screen in the auditorium.
Recently I’d been shopping for toilets to place on our pontoon boat. I sent her examples of various possibilities. Since this would be something only she would use, I thought she should choose.
So, in front of a full auditorium, she opens her email app and is hit with a banner display ad for a toilet seat made to mount on a five gallon bucket. Everyone thought it was done on purpose, as the topic of her presentation was “serving effective banner ads”.
I would think that if you consider the number of tasks you carry out every day and the number of marketing/advertising items imposed upon you every day, it’s not outrageous to think that every once in a while, you’d end up noticing a coincidence like this. Now, if you see a consistent pattern over some period of time, you might reasonably start to wonder about it.
I mean, I feel like it’s 99.9% likely coincidence, honestly. I keep my phone on a little stand, so I suppose it’s possible the phone camera could have been watching me eat, but even in the unlikely chance that’s something that tracking companies do, I doubt they’d be able to ID that it was tuna salad.
But…I asked a similar question here several years ago, back pre-Covid when I still worked in an office. I went to a Qdoba for lunch, paid cash for my burrito, and when I got back to work I quickly checked a news website on my work computer before my lunchbreak was over and saw a banner ad for Cholula hot sauce (the in-house hot sauce Qdoba uses). I asked, how did they know, when I paid cash? Or was that a coincidence? The overall SD consensus was that I had likely been tracked by GPS with my phone. So, not a coincidence then. So I just wonder about the tuna salad-- maybe the tracking companies just know me so well that an algorithm was able to predict with 97.54% accuracy that I would be in the mood for a tuna salad sandwich for lunch on May 22, 2024
Ha, great story. It did do a fine job as an example of her presentation, however unintentional…
As I mentioned in another thread, you might have been talking about the subject because you’ve seen some internet ads about it, or ads on other media. Marketing campaigns may include press releases that appear in news sources.
Hmm…good thought, but no, those ingredients were all purchased in separate trips, and even separate stores (tuna at Costco; bread, mayo, celery, onion from Kroger).
you wouldn’t have thought “hey, internet spies, you got that wrong” had they served you a YT spot on t-bone steaks, would you?
… IOW you see a pattern when it fits (tuna salad), but you do NOT see the pattern that doesn’t fit 99% of the times (tuna vs. steak) … b/c your brain does not decode it as pattern.
So something that is just happening by chance 1 out of 100 events is being decoded as “how did they KNOW?” (they didn’t, they just let out one of their 100 different spots and the key matched the lock)
I always cringe when people imply that marketing in internet is so hyper-advanced with machine learning, etc… and there are secret companies that know all about you …
FWIW, when I end an e-mail in g-mail on a friday afternoon with the phrase “have a nice …[weekend]” and I get a “…beginning of the week” suggested as autocomplete (and that is Google, goddamit) … we are still very far away from your phone secretly recording all conversations and sending it off to some telemarketer company (w/out 1000s of cybersecurity-guys catching the traffic)
also, I wrote another email a couple of weeks ago, say on april 20th making reference to the 26th [of april] … and autocomplet suggest [of june] … my autocomplete in g-mail always suggest “of june” … even in mails I send in october … go figure
Same kinda thing.
I was out at dialysis. So my phones were with me.
Daughter made brownies with Reese’s pieces (odd ingredient, for her)for the boys school. I never knew it ahead, never saw them.
But, I smelled them when I got home. Opened my laptop,
when I got in. Big orange ad for Reese’s pieces candies.
So they now know what I smell, too?
Freaky.
This is probably just ‘normal’ tracking, but it felt a bit creepy.
My wife bought a book (by a dietary nutritionist) on her Amazon account. Since that purchase, I abruptly started getting recommended videos from the author of the book, on YouTube and Instagram.
None of our online accounts are formally linked, except by virtue of us living in the same house, using the same internet connection, etc.
I’ve noticed recently that if I’m watching a Youtube video and I go to Google a term I just heard in the video, I only need to type a few letters before it autocompletes to exactly what the video was just talking about.
But there are not so secret companies that do know all about you. Take Cambridge Analytica, the company that helped the trump campaign profile voters during the 2016 election:
Cambridge Analytica bragged that it had up to 5000 data points on every US voter. By applying “psychographic” analytics to its dataset, it claimed to be able to determine people’s personality type and then individually micro-target messages to influence their behaviour.
When I worked in an office, I would often look up the website of clients and view their products in the course of my job. Then when I’d get home I’d routinely be served ads on my personal devices for those same products by those clients. Despite the fact that at work I used a company-issued computer on an entirely separate network that we weren’t allowed to use our personal devices on, the tracking companies had no trouble whatsoever tracking me from my office to my home.
My OP example probably isn’t the greatest, but it is a fact that tracking is incredibly thorough, these companies know a ton about us, and their methods are only getting more effective and precise in knowing all about who we are, what we do and what we like and dislike.
So a full day later, and you suspect “they” are spying on you? Why not two days later, or a week?
We humans have funny brains, and like to find patterns. So you “found” one…a pattern containing a sequence of two,and only two, similar things…and not consecutively.
And it took a whole day. How many times did your computer suggest something to you during those 24 hours?
If during that day, you read just a couple of threads here at the Dope, then Discourse software provided you with at least 10 suggested threads. If you read 10 or 15 threads, then you got another 50 or 75 suggestions. Youtube gave you another 10 or 20 or 50 suggestions, and your browser’s autofill gave you dozens more.
And if you want to keep looking for patterns over ,say, a 3 day weekend, you’ll get another couple hundred suggestions.
So, yeah, one of those couple hundred suggestions matched your pattern.
Because human brains are like that.
See my post just previous to yours. My OP example was not the greatest, but I see evidence all the time that “they” are spying on me. And you. In the form of tracking my habits in increasingly invasive ways across a variety of mediums and networks, and using that information to serve me extremely on-topic ads and videos.
full disclosure: I am NOT a specialist in any of that IT matter, just a rather sceptical and conservative internet user.
i “think” a lot of it has to do with social media (FB/IG/TikTok/app-of-the-month ) … that allow you so conveniently to sign in into all kinds of other services by “one-click”, through which YOU ACTIVELY link yourself to your supermarket etc… -account and connect different and independent hemispheres of your life to a bigger-entity.
Once you create this volunteer cobweb, it is progressively more likely to be trapped by your own creation - as any further piece you add can be attached ever more easily and your profile is an ever finer mosaic.
I never did social media and have rather rigid ad-blockers and all cookies expire after 30 days and never see any ads, pop ups, etc… at all. (not meant in a holier-than-thou attitude,… just an observation)
Yeah, social media is a lot of what makes it easier to be tracked. I don’t have much of a social media footprint myself; not necessarily because I don’t want to be tracked, but because I am kinda anti-social
I don’t block ads because I have, I guess, kind of a morbid interest or fascination to see what ads I’m going to be served.
Full disclosure, as a web dev working for the marketing arm of a large company, I’m, ironically, a small part of the machine. I have nothing to do with the actual tracking part, but I’ve built a few animated banner ads in the past (not my responsibility anymore, though). For awhile I was frequently served one of the ads I had built, on my home devices. That was creepily amusing, and interesting to get to see one of my ads ‘in the wild’.
I was talking to a guy last week who works in the internet advertising business. He was a really nice guy, so I resisted the urge to punch him.
According to him, there is little to no advertising being pushed due to your phone listening to you. His company doesn’t do it at all, and he wasn’t aware of any others doing it. Everything is either based on your actions (searches, purchases, web sites you visit) or geolocation.
Geolocation can be correlating your location to a store, or things like visit a waterpark and get ads for swim suits, or visit a baseball stadium, get ads for team gear. The creepy version of geolocation is when it correlates your location to other people and pushes things based on the other person’s activity, like you describe above. That is still very much a thing, and figuring out how to better correlate your needs to others’ in the vicinity is a major focus these days.
