Memes

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

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.

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

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.

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Or 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.

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.

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 🥺

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.

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. 🤨

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

How often do you use it? I'd just use a browser if possible