I am sitting at the kitchen table with my wife. She is on her iPhone - on cellular data, I am on my computer, connected to the home WiFi. I am looking at the website of a 3D printer manufacturer, and she suddenly gets a Facebook ad for that particular manufacturer on her iPhone. How did Facebook link us? We don’t share an Apple ID, or email address.
Could be a fluke, especially if that brand ponies up enough money (especially in your demographic).
She could have used your computer, or you her phone.
If she uses wifi, it could easily connect the two devices via IP address and the ad server assumed you were the same person.
Or it (FB or their ad server) could have known that the two of you are FB friends (or spouses) and either assumed she was also interested in it did it in hopes that she would mention it to you, which I assume she did.
She could click on the X/hide ad button and they’ll be an option for ‘why am I seeing this’ (or something along that line) and FB will come right out and say “you’re seeing this ad because _____”. Which reminds me, and this goes back to it being a fluke, it’s also possible that the company is serving ads up to people that liked or clicked on something she liked/clicked on.
Facebook has a spot where you can go and clear out everything it serves up ads based on. You’d be surprised how many thing are in there. Half of the things it says I ‘interacted with’ I would never interact with. How it got them, I don’t know. Maybe I clicked on something by accident.
FWIW, if there’s a lot of them it’s a PITA to clear them out one by one, but you can get the FB purity extension that can wipe them all out with just a few clicks.
No to both.
She was not on WiFi at the time, but may have been at some point in the past. I suppose FB (or the ad server) could keep track of that. I hadn’t thought about that possibility.
I’m not on FaceBook, so they should not have that connection. But, I suppose that they could data-mine her posts, and probably figure out that I’m her spouse, and then the ad server could do the same thing to figure out who I am from my IP address. Invasive and creepy, if that is what they are doing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was it. If two computers access the internet, I could see where “they” may consider them to be the same computer or at least multiple devices that are used by people that know each other. And, not being on wi-fi at the time is immertial as many website log every IP that’s been to it. I know this site does and I’m quite sure FB knows every IP address that a given user has ever used. You and her have had the same one.
Have you never created an account or just weren’t logged in at the moment. If you’ve ever logged in on that device, facebook will have no problem whatsoever knowing what websites (within some parameters) you visit. I know you said she doesn’t use your computer, but if she’s ever logged in to FB on your computer (especially if she didn’t log out), that would be the culprit.
There are add-ons that help to prevent that. If this continues to be an issue, you could download/install “facebook container” that’s supposed to make sure FB doesn’t know when you’re on other sites, it ‘contains’ facebook.
The IP address thing, I think, is more likely than datamining. But, while I’ve heard facebook goes pretty deep trying to make connections with other people, if she listed you as her spouse, it wouldn’t take much effort on their part.
Just for kicks, you may want to go to Facebook . com and make sure it’s not logged in.
Regarding ‘invasive and creepy’, call it anything you want, but it’s what FB does. They don’t charge you to use their site so they have to sell your data to customers. The more targeted it is, the more they sell it for. For example, if I sold e-cigs, I’d prefer the majority of the ads to be served to the 18-40 crowd (that smoke and/or vape, have visited a site affiliated with vaping and anything else the seller wants to use to target people) and not 100% of them to go to random people.
Anyway, like I said, it could be a fluke but I’d bet targeted her, either on purpose or by accident, on the assumption that the ads would make it to you, which it did.
probably the same way I get ads here on the sdmb that matches the thread subject… like when I went into a las Vegas thread and had various hotel and trip ads ……
I think the FB connection is a bit of a red herring. Web pages often track your browsing behaviour through cookies and it is likely that your spouse’s behaviour will have a number of points of similarities to your own. Accessing the 3D printer’s site will have triggered some analytics engine to target people with a similar enough history to yours, which in this case included your wife. Facebook is simply the platform of ad distribution rather than the source of the connection.
To answer one of the questions - I’ve never had a Facebook account.
I seriously doubt that the Venn diagram of her browsing history and mine intersect at all. We have very, very different web interests, and even use different news sites. So, I don’t think that’s how they were matching us. But, if the ad server is tying devices that have shared an IP address together, that’s very annoying - what if I start looking for a surprise present, and they start send her ads for that? Or worse.
Just because you never had a FB account doesn’t mean FB doesn’t have data on you. They can correlate all sorts of data to understand that your IP address is associated with your wife via your computer activity. Your browsing history, especially from your home, is data that is connected to your wife’s FB activity.
Are you absolutely sure? My phone automatically joins my home network as soon as I get home. I’m sure I set it up to do this at some point in the past when I didn’t have unlimited data. And I’m pretty sure that I set it up a few phones ago - but that setting apparently transfers along with everything else when I get a new iPhone.
I would chalk this up to coincidence, myself, without additional data showing an ongoing correlation.
I’m a big believer in coincidence, and confirmation bias, but the fact that I was looking at a 3D Printer manufacturer that I had never heard of before, and that she got an ad from them (and has no interest in 3D printers, and had never gotten ads for them in the past) leads me to believe that it was deliberate.
It’s very tough to say since we don’t know how the ad was targeted. Facebook ad targeting is ridiculously complex and you can do things like supply lists of leads to further target customers. Meaning, you could conceivably have bought 3D printer-related items and found your way onto a list of leads purchased by the printer manufacturer, resulting in the ad being targeted based on geographic location and/or last name. A new manufacturer might also set a very high bid price and be able to temporarily outbid every other advertiser in the ad pool (until they run out of budget or the other advertisers raise their bids in response).
If Facebook does in fact have a super-secret way to live target ads across devices with no contaminating data to link them, I have no idea how they would do it.
Use Ghostery to block embedded trackers. Pretty much any web page these days (whether or not there’s obvious advertising) has several trackers, and some have hundreds. And as you found out, a FB/Google/Twitter/whatever account isn’t necessary for them to correlate interests.
Relatedly, it could also be a Location Services thing. If you both have Location Services turned on for either the Facebook app or allow it for websites, the ad server might know you two were literally within feet of each other.
It’s not Facebook, but there is a story from a few years ago where a father got irate at a local Target manager because Target was sending his teenage daughter maternity-focused mailers. Then he went back the next day to apologize because the daughter admitted that, yes, she was pregnant. The algorithm Target employed had noticed the daughter was buying specific products at specific times that all pointed toward a pregnancy, so it automatically started sending her coupons for baby clothes, cribs, etc, despite the fact that she hadn’t told her own parents yet. So yes, it can get worse.
It is a very human thing to focus on the huge differences in your overall web behaviours, but this is irrelevant to the analytics algorithms. They don’t care at all about the differences, only about those few similarities. It only takes a couple of seemingly coincidental links for them to establish a tenuous connection.You would be amazed at what “they” know about you and this is why data science is getting the attention of privacy advocates, and the big bucks.