These are two companies.
Who sell you as a consumer to vast ad agencies and make a profit off your doom scrolling.
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
We are lucky to still have 2 choices
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.
then 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_lYOr 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.
Yeah but Facebook probably has access to the other person’s contacts where your name and phone number were stored
That’s a good point. She popped up after she changed my contact info to my new name, which I updated on FB a few weeks ago.
Though it did happen with another girl I was talking to last year and haven’t talked to since.
Here 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.
There was the incident of Target or some store realizing someone was pregnant before they did themselves, which seems relevant here.
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.
And yet they can’t recommend a song that I would actually like.
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.My dumbass reread this comment 3 times before I realized you weren’t looking into buying trailers
This is such a fucking dumb comment lol.
Google 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” ?
Dumb take is dumb
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.
Even 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.
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.
What would you use for apps like discord and whatsapp?
yeah, 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.
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.
I 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
That’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.
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 🥺
You sit on a teetering throne of lies!
So… Did you end up buying 100,000 totes like that other guy? Seeing that your mutual interests are large generic storage totes.
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…
One 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.
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.
Or that people around had already been googling this question very recently.
Yeah it’s definitely just regional popular searches for this situation
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. 🤨
There are always a lot of reasons to see what we see on ads and suggestions without them having to listen to us. Try to do the test and talk about something completely random to you around your phone. Chances are you’ll never get ads about it.
The algorithms are based on so many criterias and are so freaking good that it seems like the simplest answer is to listen to us. But with GPS, relationships, history, habits, emails/sms/messages, etc. it can be freaky how good the predictions can be. They are already “listening” in so many ways that are cheap to do, constant audio streaming is absolutely not cheap and not required.Yeah. Only a Senator would be dumb enough to realize individualized predictive AI is harder tech than voice recognition.
Is it though?
And that was over ten years ago. This stuff has only got better since then. I don’t believe they need to listen in to get scary levels of information from you. More than enough to make people convinced they’re listening like some kind of Batman shit.
Oh I followed that one, too.
The thing is, unless there’s a great breakthrough, individual behavior is dramatically less predictable than mob behavior. The Target algorithm was a great case study, but they sent those ads/coupons to EVERYONE who fit the algorithm, and much of the time they were EITHER right OR wrong. Target dropped that particular style of campaign because it had too low a match rate (hitting too many non-pregnant folks and missing too many pregnant ones). When it had that “shocking success”, was it truly a great moment for predictive AI’s, or just the chips falling right with the AI simply adjusting odds a bit?
But no, the predictive technology is harder; I say that as someone who has worked in a predictive data science division. The tuning required to make a model work better than control is hard. Ultimately, if you get ads for something you’ve never searched for before the same day you SAY you want that something, it’s the voice recognition. I’ll be clear, most models we’d work on would fail to prove themselves, get thrown out, and be picked up again. If we’d had the abililty to buy voice matches for the word “insurance” from Amazon/Google, we have been in bloody paradise.
“Oh, you wanted me to make a soda fizz, right? We should get St. Germain because that’s good in it.” … starts getting St. Germain commercials every 5 minutes. Didn’t even know they had commercials. Fucking St. Germain.
EDIT: And I have tested it. Came up with stupid things to say in front of speakers a few times, and some have definitely shown up in really bizarre TV ads. I get it, I know why Chewy is advertising to me. But what about the Plant Based Burger commercials I got in a sudden storm for a month? I’m a meat-lover, but decided to talk about plant-based burgers in my living room where the speaker is.
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
Also apple watching through the window and having “exclusive” rights to sell the same data.
Uninstall Facebook, install AeroInsta and YouTube Revanced, and use DuckDuckGo
Is there a app like AeroInsta but just for Facebook Marketplace? Where I live, it’s the only way people sell used things
How often do you use it? I’d just use a browser if possible
Unfortunately I need it daily for work ;/
I’d love an alternative, but… You know. Gotta pay the bills and share my life with the zuck
That’s why I don’t delete my account. It’s thankfully rare anymore but I have to use it for ad reports occasionally
I absolutely despise FB marketplace around here, it’s full of scams and stolen goods
In my area it’s good, the only problem is that it’s the only way to found used things here
does 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)AeroInsta 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.
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.
I’m glad we meet here, on the fediverse 👍
One 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
Wasting multiple options by repeating both companies twice…
If 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
To be honest even after listening to all shits, they suggest me stupid things which I don’t even care about.
Glad I left all BT behind , just WhatsApp left…
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