• NumbersCanBeFun@kbin.social
    1154·
    1 year ago

    You know these algorithms are designed for predictive advertisement based off your previous activity. What is likely going on is this:

    10,000 users who searched these terms also decided to search or want this “thing” next.

    “Woah, it’s reading my mind! How did it know I was thinking about that?!”

    It’s funny, nobody pays attention when the algorithm guesses wrong, we only notice it when it’s freakishly accurate.

    • mustardman@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      51·
      1 year ago

      Certain products use algorithms that predict you’re going to stop using it before you’re even aware. This can trigger things to sent you emails, etc with some perk.

          • NumbersCanBeFun@kbin.social
            5·
            1 year ago

            You can fight this you know. There are a lot of great YouTube video tutorials by MentalOutlaw that will help you tighten down your security settings and make it more difficult to identify and track you across the internet.

            Does this come at a high cost of convenience? Absolutely. Most of my security settings break websites by default since I restrict all 3rd party apps and JavaScript. It takes me a good couple minutes to play around and see what is causing the issue.

            If I can’t figure out how read your site without handing over a bunch of access, I move to the 2nd or 3rd site that usually gives me what I want without changing any settings at all.

      • huginn@feddit.it
        12·
        1 year ago

        Understanding what is real is the first step to controlling what controls you

      • Trekman10@sh.itjust.works
        101·
        1 year ago

        No, it helps you understand what it actually is so you can think of solutions based on information instead of fear.

      • Provoked Gamer@lemmy.ca
        13·
        1 year ago

        Use a dns blocker (like nextdns) for systemwide ad blocking meaning it blocks mobile ads too. I haven’t had an ad in ages.

        Edit: Or use something like adaway if you’re on android.

        • Cyberwitch_7493@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I tried to use adaway but I can’t do root and I already use a VPN. 😭 Thankfully I use NewPipe x Sponsorblock and ublock origin in Firefox so I’m usually covered.

      • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
        9·
        1 year ago

        I’ve got ublock origin in firefox on my phone. Pihole also helps. So I ask again: you guys get ads?

        • Trekman10@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          1 year ago

          Sometimes things open in-app and use Google to load the page, so even if I select “open in firefox” after, there’s still an ad. Plus ads in apps in general.

        • RojoSanIchiban@lemmy.world
          72·
          1 year ago

          Downvoters don’t know Brave is the best thing for iOS users.

          Ya see, Android fellows, Apple forces everyone onto webkit in iOS, and iOS Firefox can’t use extensions.

          Brave has its blocker built in.

          • –Phase–@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            You can get the FFUpdater app from F-Droid, then use that to install Brave to your phone. But at that point, you may as well just use FFUpdater to install the much better alternative, Firefox, which doesn’t indirectly support Chromium engine dominance and doesn’t have that weird crypto crap Brave has.

            Edit: Someone else replied to you suggesting Mull, which is also downloadable through the FFUpdater app.

              • nudny ekscentryk@szmer.info
                1·
                1 year ago

                ublock origin on firefox mobile has been a thing for years. same for decentraleyes and darkreader. the recent change affects other extensions.

                • Trekman10@sh.itjust.works
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  What I thought was that Mobile had it’s own built-in adblocking. I specifically remember being able to add the extension in a way I wasn’t able to a few months ago recently.

    • frippa@lemmy.ml
      10·
      1 year ago

      Yesterday my ublock failed me and I had to watch a full 5 seconds of ads for 3 times! Fortunately it seems to work after updating filters now

        • frippa@lemmy.ml
          5·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, Idk why but ublock auto-nuked the filters I entered (that nice custom filter from Tumblr), i didn’t notice but I did after the satanic torture by yt (15 secs of ads I won’t get back) I fortunately went on the dashboard and noticed my filters weren’t there, immediately re-pasted them.

  • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
    54·
    1 year ago

    Wait, did we go from being freaked out that our devices might be passively recording our speech to accepting it as the “good and normal” version of things? Cause I’m pretty alarmed at both.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
      15·
      1 year ago

      I was going to say this! Just goes to show how dangerously effective mass conditioning by unscrupulous corporations is!

      Hell, a lot of people think that caring about data privacy and -security AT ALL is for losers unless naked pics are involved 🤦

      • iByteABit [he/him]@lemm.ee
        3·
        1 year ago

        I get so frustrated when people find it extremely weird that I care about my privacy at all and haven’t accepted that I’m under surveillance 24/7. I know I can’t achieve full privacy, but why is a little more privacy a bad thing and why do they take it so damn personally, without even telling them to do the same. There are so many people who are cucks for corporations, silently accepting every new violation of their rights as if they have no alternative.

        • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
          2·
          1 year ago

          They just don’t know what is on the line. They still believe the only things those corporations are gathering are the stuff we post online ourselves.

          Or they blatantly don’t care. Siting arguments like “I don’t have anything to hide”, which irks me to no end.

          “You sure you have nothing to hide Denise? Do you also leave the door open when you go to a public toilet, Denise? I thought you had nothing to hide, Denise?”

    • Pipoca@lemmy.world
      14·
      1 year ago

      Your devices recording you is something that doesn’t happen.

      That requires a lot of bandwidth, or a lot of battery and a little bandwidth. There’s no evidence of that happening.

      Honestly, the creepier thing is that they don’t have to to get creepily accurate ads.

      Geolocation data means they know who you spend time with. They also know their search history. They know your interests. They can look at what people who seem similar to you search for.

      Plus, they serve you a lot of ads so they can afford to have a lot of misses.

      • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
        4·
        1 year ago

        Your devices recording you is something that doesn’t happen.

        There’s no evidence of that happening.

        What’s your basis for this claim? I mean that might be the case, but is there some reason you’re able to have so much certainty?

        I understand the “bandwidth” argument, and the “they don’t even need that” argument (I make a similar case in a comment to another reply), but neither of those support the idea that it can’t be happening.

        Getting around the bandwidth problem isn’t that crazy: Low bitrate encodings (cause the audio doesn’t need to be human-comprehensible) and edge compute (i.e. doing some work on the device before sending anything) could mitigate this significantly, so it’s hardly impossible.

        I think we mostly agree, I just wouldn’t apply that degree of certainty. But if you’re really confident that it’s definitely not happening because it’s definitely not possible, maybe you know something I don’t?

      • cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca
        3·
        1 year ago

        I guarantee you could do it all on-device with only a few KB upload per day.

        Use a poor quality but fast text to speech algo, and use a bloom filter to track ad keyword hits and upload it periodically. It’ll use very little battery or data. If you’re wrong, the users don’t click and your online ad server explores other keywords.

        I don’t think they need to do this though.

      • baropithecus@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Personal story time. A few years back, I texted (through Whatsapp) a colleague for a few minutes about a friend taking up welding as a supplementary source of income, and immediately (within the day) received a targeted ad in the Duolingo app for… welding torches. Important facts, I don’t weld, I’ve never done any welding and I don’t know anything about welding. How this bit of info got from whatsapp to whomever was providing interstitial ads in the duolingo app, I have no idea. My best guess is still that google’s keyboard app is logging every single keystroke I type and aggregating it in a database somewhere. I can’t fathom how that shit isn’t extremely illegal.

      • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        Instead of recording and sending to servers, the tracker could use some speech to text locally amd send transcription to the servers too

        • Pipoca@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          Right - that would require enough battery and processing power to make it obvious that it’s doing something like that.

          • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            21·
            1 year ago

            I don’t think so. Text to speech and speech to text engines are availiable locally without much power i guess. Also there could be error prone algorithm which records low quality audio for sake of performance and extended battery which is still enough. Also its not far off from recording and sending low quality audio to servers as intermet speeds are much faster than an audio stream

            • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
              1·
              1 year ago

              They are available locally yes, but not without much power and processing.

              So much power and processing usage, you would notice.

    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
      36·
      1 year ago

      especially as it doesn’t even happen.

      “oh yeah well how come I was talking about something mundane, common and extremely popular and then but 4 days later saw an ad for it?!?!?”

      big mystery indeed

      • thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca
        2·
        1 year ago

        You’re getting some downvotes, but yes, lol. I mean I’m not sure there’s never any surreptitious hot mic eavesdropping going on, but people definitely often assume so when there’s a more parsimonious explanation, e.g.:

        Most peoples’ ads are targeted based on more mundane technology, and they see hundreds of ads per day, so if even 1% of their ads overlap with something that they were just talking about, they’ll still be fairly likely to see a spooky “I was just talking about that!” ad relatively frequently. Not to mention that they’re likely to be thinking about a thing because their platforms are also proactively marketing that thing to them. Just pareidolia, no eavesdropping necessary.

        Doesn’t mean eavesdropping isn’t happening-- Just means it doesn’t need to be happening for that effect to occur.

        • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’m in marketing, I subscribe all all marketing new sources, I run a martech stack of a bunch of different channels: paid 3rd party syndication, search intent, ecosystem intent, technographics, firmographics, psychegraphics, funding round research, paid and organic social, paid and organic SEO, display, video, in app placements, new hiring intent… none of these platforms offer me “conversational intent”

          so it’s only usage would be if

          a) you are already cooked (or server side ID’d) b) your conversation procs a buying intent signal for an affinity cluster c) they secretly inject that signal into the data and obfuscate its source

          well, now you just have worse data that’s also illegal. So what’s the motivation?

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
        2·
        1 year ago

        It is rarely some coincidence and has more to do with extrapolating data.

        If you talk with a friend about getting a pet, your phone and by extension the ad company that receives your location data, knows you 2 saw each other.

        If that other person searched for pet food, then you will also receive ads for pet food even though you “only talked about it”.

        Other example, you post you have a new job on Facebook (which a lot of people do). Facebook knows where you live because of location data, and they know where the company is located since it is public data. So they know how close those 2 are. If Facebook then looks through your photos and notices none of them have a picture of a bike in the last 5 years. Then you are likely to buy a bike in order to go to work. Thus you get ads for bikes.

  • regalia@literature.cafe
    18·
    1 year ago

    I haven’t seen ads in years lol. I’m very aggressively adblocked on every layer possible. Even down to setting my router to use an adblocker dns as a final protection layer.

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
    16·
    1 year ago

    Don’t worry, those big platforms can’t read your thoughts. Those ads aren’t there because you thought of those things.

    Because it’s the other way around. They want you to buy the stuff they have ads for so they manipulate you into thinking about those things first.

  • weird_nugget@lemmy.world
    15·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been doubting my sexuality lately and I freaked out when Google recommended an ad with LGBT couple on it. Not even my friends or family know that side of me.

    • Rozaŭtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      81·
      1 year ago

      Oh, it’s been proven Google and corporate social medias (and Walmart?!?) can figure out that stuff before you do.

    • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.mlEnglish
      51·
      1 year ago

      I can understand being freaked out by that for sure. Think of it like this, you might like similar artists and articles that LGBT folks like. Maybe you click on more links on stories that affect LGBT folks. But also, lots of ads have LGBT couples nowadays, it’s what gets the red hats so upset. Either way, it’s nothing to be ashamed or worried about, and there’s at least a chance that you took something to be more deeply targeted at you than it really was. Chin up there, yeah?

      • weird_nugget@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 year ago

        What really upset me though was the privacy aspect of it. Imagine your friend wants to show you a meme or something, and you suddenly see an ad with an LGBT couple on it on his/her phone. If that was me I would immediately think they’re being targeted with that ad for a reason. And like, I don’t have a problem being part of the LGBT community, but this thing could out me to everyone without me being ready you know? What if I want to play a YouTube video for my family and I get a targeted recommendation? That would be a problem for me.

        • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I do totally understand that, and that must’ve been jarring and anxiety inducing. What I was trying to convey is that straight folks get those ads too but I don’t meant to downplay the emotional disturbance of it all whatsoever, just help ease your mind now.

    • zerofk@lemm.ee
      73·
      1 year ago

      I’m going to push back against everyone saying that the algorithm knows. While not unthinkable, I believe it is much more likely that it is a coincidence, and what you’re experiencing is called the frequency illusion. Simply because your sexuality has been on your mind lately, you’re more likely to notice things that remind you of it - not because those things are more prevalent but simply because you, subconsciously, pay more attention to them.

      That said, privacy is important and you should definitely try to maintain it - e.g. use a private browser window in a fresh browser instance to research things related to sexuality.

      • ZzyzxRoad@lemm.ee
        5·
        1 year ago

        It’s hard to believe anyone missed this:

        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.

        This article is from 2012

        I wouldn’t underestimate it. I also wouldn’t buy into the “I have nothing to hide” narrative. It’s not about hiding or not hiding. The fallout from the Dobbs decision is a great example of why, if you aren’t concerned with privacy now, then you will be in the future. All of a sudden, the right of 51% of the population to make decisions about their own bodies was suddenly gone, and handed over to state governments. The day before that decision, people needing abortions and the doctors who provide them had “nothing to hide.” The day after? They’re suddenly criminals. Their social media can be monitored. Their online and in-person purchases. Where they travel and why. Their medical records. And maybe worst of all, their fellow Americans are offered prize money if they turn someone in so that they can be charged in criminal court.

        Or what about Florida’s “risk prediction” software that supposedly can predict which “at-risk” (aka non-white) kids will become criminals? Maybe I’m wrong for finding that unsettling. This is from 2015

        https://theweek.com/articles/495147/floridas-minority-report-crime-prediction-software

        What about social credit scores? Which we already have, we just don’t get to see them (LexisNexis “risk solution” software). But sooner rather than later, every word and action will be recorded and held against us in every aspect of our lives, rather than just when applying for jobs and mortgages. And anti-discrimination laws don’t do shit. They always find a work around. Although with the current supreme court I’m sure all forms of discrimination will be perfectly legal soon enough.

        Btw private browsing doesn’t prevent tracking. It just doesn’t store anything in the broswer history.

        • cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca
          1·
          1 year ago

          Even using a VPN only protects you from your ISP.

          If you’ve got Gmail or Google location services or FB installed, or an app running their SDKs in the background, your VPN IP address can be linked back to your device.

          Privacy is really hard in 2023.

      • Nelots@lemm.eeEnglish
        31·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is fascinating and something that I experience constantly. I would be surprised if that’s not what’s going on here. I’ve never experienced it for something as personal and important as doubting my sexuality though, that must be jarring as hell.

  • brlemworld@lemmy.world
    13·
    1 year ago

    You get ads about things you have photographed. If you give Facebook image access, it will scan ALL of your photos locally. I had some photos of couches it started giving me ads for them.