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Do you ever get a weird change in them and wonder why?
I got adverts for wholesale kumho tyres and a company that does caterham track prep/mods today, and was somewhat confused. Then I realised I'd googled a firm owned by a pretty successful racing driver last night. Do you think that's enough for them?
I mean I'd love a Caterham, especially one with some tasty track prep, along with a subsequent requirement for a trade tyre account, but alas I have no cash/time.
Cookies
Yeah I know that, but it's the connections they make with the cookies.
i.e. if I google specialist midget based fictional films, I'd expect to get ads for them, but my ads changed for no apparent reason except that, well, the above. I guess plenty of people searching for his company must be into cars, but I wouldn't have put them together (and maybe it was in fact something else?)
i.e. if I google specialist midget based fictional films,
You'd be disappointed, the genre is totally overrated.
Bear in mind, these things are getting very sophisticated these days.
Is you Googling a racing firm sufficient to serve up Caterham adverts? In isolation maybe, maybe not, but if a hundred thousand people googling racing firms also went on to search for Caterhams...?
There's been a few high-profile cases of this where the matching algorithms were too good. Based on other people's search histories, a little while back there were reports of Facebook starting offering up home pregnancy tests and baby stuff to one young woman before she'd even considered herself that she might be pregnant.
Is you Googling a racing firm sufficient to serve up Caterham adverts?
It wasn't a racing firm, it was a haulage firm (owned by a racing driver).
WhatsApp message content is used to send targeted ads.
@Cougar - that story's probably an urban myth. I first heard it many years ago and it's been ascribed to Amazon and supermarket loyalty cards.
It wasn’t a racing firm, it was a haulage firm (owned by a racing driver).
Fair enough. Point stands though, if lots and lots of people who Google for hatstands also Google for car seat covers, you're going to get targeted ads for seat covers when you search for hatstands too.
WhatsApp message content is used to send targeted ads.
I highly doubt that.
WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, the message content is secure (at least in theory). There was talk a while back of using Facebook data to target WhatsApp users but the last I heard was that GDPR put the kibosh on that idea.
@Cougar – that story’s probably an urban myth.
Hum. That surprises me, I'm usually good with urban myths. I'll see if I can find a definitive source / confirmation / debunk after I've eaten. Cheers.
Hum. That surprises me, I’m usually good with urban myths. I’ll see if I can find a definitive source / confirmation / debunk after I’ve eaten. Cheers.
American retailer Target is the source of it and it was reported in the New York Times.
In the end the guy who wrote a book about it concluded that although the story was , on balance, probably true it was more likely as a result of chance rather than ominous computer intelligence.
They were sending coupons for pregancy products out to a targetted but still pretty broad range of customers ( i.e women in their teens and twenties) including a large proportion who they assumed wouldn't be pregnant at all.
Some teenagers Dad got the wrong end of the stick.*
* the end with two blue lines on it that smells of pish, presumably
Slightly off-topic.
I joined Google+ (or Google Circles whatever it was called at the time) and got one of those "People you might like to add as friends" type emails. Now Google probably know quite a bit about those who use its services but the algorithms weren't that clever. There were three names on the list:
1. My boss. He sat next to me in the office.
2. My best man.
3. Me. I'd two Google accounts, one personal, one work.
Still it was right. I did know them, except maybe the last one ...
adverts? 😉
I suspect some of it is confirmation bias too. You start noticing things like adverts, youtube recommendations based upon recent activities, but often those were totally private communication.
I've had youtube recommendations for example that were very well aligned with discussions I've had with friends, rather than me clicking on links. Now given that those discussions were face to face (OK we both have Android phones that potentially could have been listening to the ambient noise in the pub), but also via IRC channel. Except we own that server, we set up the SSL encryption, and indeed that really is end to end entirely within our control... not potential pretend end to end where only the link between the phone and the servers is encrypted.
So either there is proper scary Russia/NorthKorea spec spying going on, or you just notice things, because it was already a topic in your mind.