Recently, I find myself making decisions about what to buy based on whether I really want to be swamped with ads for those same things from now until doomsday.
One of my elder care clients has a condition that she just told me about. I was in the drugstore today. And I found myself seriously contemplating whether picking up an OTC remedy for her was worth the persistent advertisements that will inundate my phone, for an embarrassing condition that I don’t have.
I once researched the connection between psoriasis and asthma, because I have a very close friend who had the one and came down with the other. To this day, several months later, I am still seeing ads for things relating to those two conditions, every single day.
It’s annoying because I know it’s in a profile of me somewhere that anyone can pay to see. What people might make what kind of decisions about me, based on that? Insurers? Employers? Who knows?
What about someone who paid for a funeral with their credit card? Are they still seeing ads for funeral homes and end-of-life care facilities months later, reminding them of their heartbreaking bereavement?
Or someone with a life-threatening illness who pays for co-pays or prescriptions with their debit or credit card? How does it affect their psychological well-being and their will to fight their disease when they are reminded of it every time they play a stupid flash game on their phone?
I wonder if there might be grounds for a class-action suit based on targeted advertising. It is intrusive in ways that are out of control. Advertisers do not have an absolute god-given right to know everything about you.
You are concerned that making in-person purchases with a credit card will cause you to receive online ads for those things?
I pay for prescriptions with a credit card. While I sometimes get drug ads like anybody else, I have never gotten an online drug ad for anything that is related to my ailments. I conclude that the drug ads I get are just the random ones that everyone in my demographic group gets.
Yes, I did pay for a funeral with a credit card. I don’t get ads for funeral services.
But, yes, if I look for some goofy item online that I saw mentioned in a post here, I will get ads for that item for months.
But, seriously, if that is a concern, pay cash and don’t use your frequent shopper card. In the United States, it would be a HIPAA violation for a drug store to disclose your prescriptions to an advertiser. Although I do understand that CVS makes you agree to a partial waiver if you want to join their pharmacy rewards program.
I like to obsessively research various topics with the goal of building them in the future. The vast majority of the time it isn’t practical for me to build the project like I want to so they don’t happen.
For instance I am currently researching building a 6’x12’x8’ paludarium for a caiman lizard to put in a house I’m building. I’m at least 3 years out from working on this exhibit for real but almost all of my adds are for parts and equipment. Just a month ago it was all for home building and designing stuff. It kind of makes me smile how I’m tracked but none of the adds are for things I’d actually buy.
My wife and her co-workers were doing an escape room, and so she asked me to google the address of the place while she was getting ready; she knew the general area, but wanted to figure out the best place to park before she hopped in the car. In the days that followed, I got a ton of ads for a movie that (a) had hit theaters weeks earlier, but that (b) had, previously, sent zero ads my way.
The movie was, of course, “Escape Room”.
As far as I can tell, they’re laughably bad at this.
Lawyers (including my firm) have been approached by people offering to give us advertisement access to people who are in (or have recently been) in emergency rooms or funeral homes. Apparently they can get this info from cell phone location software. I find it offensive and creepy and told them to go to hell. I suppose you could say it’s just offering them information they might be needed, and it’s perfectly fine. Personally, I don’t want ads targeted to me. If I want a product or service, I’ll google it and check out the website. I will not, ever, click on an ad.
Harassment? Well, I’m sure somewhere in the Terms of Service of whatever app or site you visit states that they retain the right to use/share the non-personal info about you. There are also cookies, that unless blocked can track only your visit to the site, but everything you click on as well as how long you were there.
I do find it absurd that I get ads for things I’ve already purchased. Amazon is notorious about targeted ads; I’ll see a Facebook ad for something I browsed on Amazon. dunno if Amazon is selling the info or if acebook’s ads are using the same cookies.
It can lead to trouble. There was a story where a family had FBI agents waiting for them when they came home, asking to search their house.
You see, this was in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, and their recent search history included “pressure cooker” and “backpack”.
It turns out the tip actually came from a former employer because of searches done while the husband worked there (cite: Michele Catalano: Pressure cooker search was not due to NSA surveillance.) but it’s not out of line to believe that one way or another, what you look for online will be aggregated and used (or misused).
Last year when my husband and I were both playing the “Let’s Have Surgery” game, our household bought a number of unusual items that might be associated with the elderly and/or disabled. I’m still surprised we aren’t getting sales calls from prepaid funeral services.
It’s also laughably stupid. I booked a hotel in Las Vegas for a conference and for months I kept getting ads telling me about their current deals. I doubt I’m ever going to go back and if I did, I’d probably look for a different hotel. So they’re targeting someone who has little intention of using their services, and just pissing me off that they keep pushing it.
Same when a bought a new car. A month later I started getting ads to buy another. Who on Earth does something like that?
Well, it’s a reminder that we’re being monitored constantly. Last week I was having a general discussion (my phone was on me, but not in use) about electric bikes. An hour later, an ad for electric bikes hit my instragram feed.
I bet that the people who pay for ads have figured out that paying for a funeral doesn’t make you more likely to buy another funeral the way that paying for a treatment for a particular ailment makes you incredibly likely to continue to pay for treatments to that ailment.
This solution will likely work for only a few years (if it’s even that good at all) because facial recognition is coming.
I doubt that you could successfully sue a big company over this. You can to some extent stop patronizing the companies that do this. Use DuckDuckGo for your searches rather than Google. Find brick and mortar stores that will publicly commit to not selling that information (ideally, to not keeping it at all). Burn your facebook profile to the ground. Etc.
I think that the best solution is to figure out how to stop seeing the ads. I’m sure all those companies have deep profiles on my spending behavior, but I see hardly any ads on anything. Adblockers work well.
I’ve seen lots of speculation that our phones are listening to us talk, but there’s never been any confirmation (unless you say the trigger word for Alexa/Cortana/Siri, etc.)
I am skeptical that it’s happening. It would be such a massive PR disaster.
There are lots of ways this might have happened, the most obvious one being just coincidence. The second most obvious is that whoever you were talking to did a search for electric bikes and the ad companies know there’s a social connection between you (and if you arranged a meetup over gmail or facebook messenger or anything else data-mine-able, they even know that you were talking to that person right before they did an electric bike search).
heck I’ve seen thread targeted ads here on the dope … like a while back someone was going to the pinball hall of fame in las vegas … every time I went in that thread there were 2 or 3 for various things in Vegas
and ads for local casinos in ca say "why go to Vegas stay with us in nice and sunny CA "