I had a weird moment in the bathroom today. Was brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush while watching a documentary about the economy of Argentina with my iPad sitting right in front of me. Two minutes into the documentary the show is interrupted by a Google ad, and what was that ad trying to sell me? An electric toothbrush!!! Oh, what a coincidence! Or was it? Is there any way, is it technically possible that the iPad secretly records images or sound and feeds it into the Google ad system that creates those ads? Tell me it just was a coincidence!!!
3 Likes
Yep these kind of coincidences are common. Some say it’s because they track everything about you they can predict what you want and your behaviour. But who knows?
2 Likes
Sure, buddy. Just a coincidence.
1 Like
I don’t think I ever Googled or Youtube-watched anything about electric toothbrushes, though. I did brush my teeth without electric power my whole life until a few months ago. Do they know I bought one recently? That would be equally worrisome.
It detected an abnormal sound in your electric toothbrush, predicted it’s impending demise, and is proactively offering you replacement options!
2 Likes
Hopefully, they don’t show an ad for viagra next, based on my grunting pattern…
2 Likes
Using AI and data analytics they know what age you are , your purchases or kinds of things you searched before , roughly your income level and can predict what things you may be interested in now. When they get it right you will notice it more. They will know what devices you have as well (iPad owner can definitely afford and may be interested in an expensive branded electric toothbrush) and also how much time you spend at home or in an office , when you wake up and go to sleep .
I think so anyway.
And for your reference my wife said she wants to buy some electric toothbrushes this week, we also never bought before , they are getting more popular as they get cheaper. She told me Xiaomi s are cheap.
I think most of the time they get it wrong, have yet to see an ad where I thought, I really need to buy that! Youtube ads actually annoy me to no end. All those online game ones for example. I am not that age, never played or bought or searched for those games, never watched game streams, etc.
Let me know when you see an electric -toothbrush ad! 
yep I have a lot of badly targeted ads but I don’t allow them all my data either .
Lol that would be funny. This site doesn’t have dynamic ads I think . I used to run dynamic ad campaigns where you would be tracked across different sites with our product haha. Puts a cookie on your browser and you are screwed. It works but it actually annoys people too . This is due to you searching for that, but in your case it is predicting by your other searches and your behaviours.
I’ve had supposedly-secure messages from people about specific devices or purchases on WhatsApp and then been surprised that Amazon has decided to send me a marketing email all about that particular product, despite me not googling it, clicking any links, or reacting to it in any way outside of the WhatsApp application.
There’s somewhere on YouTube, I forget where, where you can look at the information that they’ve derived, based on the data they have. Stuff like age, gender, location, sexual orientation, it’s fucked up.
2 Likes
I’ve set every privacy setting under the sun, and supposedly Apple is a lot more tight-lipped about personal data (I remember ad execs were freaking out when “ask app not to track” became a thing in one iOS), and it’d still push for things I merely searched for on Amazon or even mentioned verbally in passing with my 乾哥.
1 Like