> I have no doubts that a lot of information is being tracked, stored, and sold. Since that's already done, could you guys at least use some of it?..
You can be certain that they are using that data. The truth is that the data being collected about you is not intended to benefit you, it's being gathered and stored and sold to be used against you in any way that the person with that data feels might be an advantage for them.
It's not really about showing you relevant ads, or helpful recommendations, or useful product offerings. It hasn't been about any of those things for a very long time now. Your data will still be used that way, but while companies will tell you that is mainly why they collect your data that is a lie. Those are secondary uses for your data and making those things work well for your benefit is a cost to the companies and they are only willing to invest so much time/money/effort into that.
Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense, and where it isn't being used today, it's being stored for a time in the future when it can be used more effectively against you. AI promises to make it easier than ever to trawl through all that data and find ways to leverage it to better manipulate you, or take more of your money from you, or further limit any possible risk you might expose a company to.
Companies don't want you to be aware of when and how that data is being used, so it's natural for you to feel like it's all being ignored, but you can sure that a lot of work is going into finding new and creative ways to put all that data to use.
> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.
Same here.
I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.
What's freaky is there are people who actually like the ads.
Granted, many of us enjoy the kooky ads that occur during the Super Bowl. That's not really what I'm talking about. I've met people who say they enjoy midroll ads in videos and podcasts. There are even folks who like banner ads. To me, those all represent precious seconds that add up to countless hours of my life wasted, which I will never get back. The more ads I avoid, the more opportunity to experience life I have.
Another horrible thing about ads in general is they distract one from being alone with their own thoughts. A lot of people are too afraid to spend time alone with their own thoughts, so in a sense they might enjoy the fact that any sensory input can take them away from that. To me, modern ads are thought vampires. It might be one thing if ads focused on the merits of products, and if most products today were of quality and a fair price, except that is not the norm.
For example, insight into the french advertisement culture makes you appreciate the full depth of the movie "99 francs":
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0875113/
Targeted advertising will never feel good, and it's not due to lack of information. Consider the following:
- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.
- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? Not everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.
ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.
Targeting was super easy back in the days, when it was done based on where the ad appeared. Putting video game ads into a video game magazine and not diaper ads was kind of a no-brainer, but on the net I had to suffer through diaper ads on a video game site.
Not sure why we got to this point. If there had only been video game ads on my video game site I wouldn't have had to resort to adblocking back in - checks calendar - 2007.
My parents were frugal; we acquired most possessions second hand, and we learned to view all advertisements with suspicion. Seeing an ad on television practically guaranteed that we wouldn't be wasting our money on whatever it depicted.
Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
My father told me: “If they are advertising it you don’t need it”
Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”
But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things
The secret that most people in business don’t want to admit is that the vast majority of internet/media advertising is not worth the cost.
They are throwing many different strategies out there through many different avenues and banking one the one that just happens to pull in a new chunk of buyers. It’s like lower-stakes gambling.
If I make let's say a children's toy, how am I supposed to let people know that this new type of toy even exists? That WHOLE process is advertising, no? Whether I give these toys away for free at a Santa Clause parade, pay department stores to put my toy in prominent shelves, or buy space on Cartoon Network.
How do you get even a single buyer without advertising?
This isn't true in the general sense, for new products with no distribution or customer awareness it's very important to advertise how else will anyone know about it.
Paid promotion in publications is a much more gentler way to advertise though compared to modern internet advertising. Back in the day I'd buy computer magazines - basically the whole point of which was to make me aware of new products. But the articles were at least somewhat at arm's length and not pure ad copy.
That's true for the advertising companies, but Google or whatever advertiser have a big stake in showing you the ad from the millions they serve that you're most likely to click/buy/complete. So there's no fault on McDonald's part, but if you're a vegetarian, arguably Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.
> Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
yes this is right and why the parent is totally off base
> That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
This is totally wrong. Ads targeting "algorithms" are some of the most complicated systems on earth. First of all, it is completely done by machine learning models now not simple algorithms, and within companies who are doing ads targeting well (ie, Google, Meta, Tiktok, and if you want to go down the list to the less competent companies then you can include X and Reddit and others) there is massive internal pressure and competition to get any edge by either improving models or other parts of the ads targeting stack. The top dogs as in Tiktok, Google Search, and Meta have been posting 10+% yoy ads revenue numbers for many years now with a much smaller increase or even flatlining user counts. It's all due to improvements in the ads stack making them more effective and more useful for advertisers (and they and the article in the post would say users as well but HN mostly doesn't subscribe to this viewpoint) driving more total ads spend and a growing economy.
Let me ask you this directly, I'd love to hear your takes as somebody working in ad targeting: Don't you think what you're building is kinda... creepy?
My perception is that your job is to build a model to psychologically profile people at scale to manipulate them into buying stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. Now, first of all, that seems incredibly unsettling to me in its own right already.
But where it gets really unsettling is if you think even a little bit past the immediate usecase: Once you have this sort of model, who knows what sort of other stuff you can manipulate people into? Should people like Zuckerberg really have the power to do this? And if you trust Zuckerberg, what about other players? Say an authoritarian state somehow managed to get control over these models. Doesn't it seem like you're building an incredibly dangerous thing here?
Wonder how you feel about these things and if you've ever had similar concerns. Like, I get that there's probably all sorts of interesting engineering problems involved. But one could say the same thing about von Braun building the V2 - these things aren't just puzzles in isolation!
>That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is an important point: advertisers don't really lose much by showing you ads you don't want, so it's unlikely the system would ever become ultra-precise.
At the scale of a McDonalds ad campaign that seems easy to measure: go to the nearest Target parking lot and ask as many people as you can two questions: "are you vegetarian" and "did you see {description of ad here}". Then compare how which percentage of vegetarians saw the ad compared to the percentage of non-vegetarians saw the ad. There are even companies specialized in market research that will do this in a more representative and statistically rigorous way
Doesn’t Google earn more from McDonalds if Google provides McDonalds with a higher click through rate? If you’re providing a high click through rate, you’ve probably done the due diligence to screen vegetarians already
I don't really see how you could solve this problem with a sufficiently complex algorithm. Which ads are shown still depends on how much the vendor is willing to spend on marketing. I may have zero interest in Ford cars, but if Ford is the one spending the big bucks in the "car" category I'll see a lot of Ford ads.
What people seem to be looking for is not targeted advertising but targeted recommendations - where vendor "spend" can't skew the results to show you crap you don't want. But that's a product the consumer and not the vendor would have to pay for, by definition. Unfortunately consumers don't have deep enough pockets to make this kind of thing lucrative over just selling ads.
No, the price that is charged in a specific impression is adjusted by the relevance to the user. If the user relevance is 0.001% a Ford ad would need to spend 100000x more dollars per impression than the same ad for Toyota with a user relevance of 100%. So in practice you might get some amounts of "high cost lower relevance" ads but not to the extent that people think. The advertising broker (as in Google for Google Search) has an active interest in showing good ads relevant ads for the user in order to not negatively impact Google Search metrics, and also maximize clickthroughs or other goal metrics for the advertiser. Poorly matched ads are antithetical to that purpose.
There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.
Exactly. The ad-revenue companies will show you the ads the advertisers pay for that make the most money for them. Your actual wants, needs, preferences, and specifics are only important in the way that they make you a sellable target to the advertisers.
It's an entirely soulless process, which makes my extensive ad-blocking regime entirely justified the same way that walking off of a beaten path in the woods is justified.
I have bought a number of $50-$100 things that are advertised to me on Instagram. I think I bought a $1,000 piece of furniture once.
Instagram ads are perfectly targeted to me. I am sometimes amazed at how often they show me good products that I legitimately want to buy - often niche, unique products from companies I didn't know existed. Obviously they are combining information from other sites I visit, because the accounts I follow on Instagram have nothing to do with any products.
Targeted ads in this setting are quite useful and pleasant for me! I wish Meta all the best in making them even better. I'm sure they are also super useful for the small businesses making the products I buy, because they can build awareness much more cost-effectively than other mechanisms.
Yes, I agree that when I visit my local news sites and see "targeted" ads for sports gambling, "800 singles in your area", or other nonsense I'm not interested in, it's pretty unpleasant. But those are just shitty ads.
I agree with part of this. I don't know what Instagram is doing, but their ads are remarkably well targeted. The rest of the internet needs to do whatever they are doing.
Whatever Meta is doing on Instagram is next level advertising.
It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So while Google is trying to get me to buy discrete transistors and push cart tires (work related stuff), Meta is trying to get me to buy bespoke Icelandic wool socks, artisan gummy edibles, and hand made ceramic table ware.
The few times I ever used Instagram, it knew me where I went to university (a different country) and then recommended I take a cybersecurity course. That was rather scary because it shouldn't have that information.
The flipside of this was a shoe-shine boy moment for me about ads and advertising, recently and personally.
A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.
I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.
I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.
What was the nature of the business? Was it the kind of thing where referrals from existing customers would have helped? Was it on Google Maps and similar, and findable by people looking for the service they were offering? Were they losing business to competitors, or were people who needed it not finding it? Where were those people naturally looking, without ads?
It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all. I recently told my wife how to install an ad blocker and her response was "but sometimes I see cool stuff in ads". I'm sure the percentage of "cool stuff" she sees is higher because of what they know about her.
Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
As an aside, there is exactly one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations. Because for whatever reason they advertise a lot of cultural events (concerts, festivals, plays, etc).
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
Isn't the point of those, that in the end, the likelihood of you buying something again just recently bought might be tiny, but is probably still bigger than showing the same add to a random other person?
It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.
Back in the bad old days of adobe and flash plugins in Internet explorer, malicious ads targetting those were the malware infection vector in something like 80% of cases. Browsers have gotten better, but it remains the case that ad networks are the single easiest way to inject your mal-content into another website.
In those days, any time I handled a client call about malware, I replaced everything with Chrome (built in pdf viewer, sandboxed/autoupdated flash) and adblock plus. And then, my calls from those users stopped being about malware or slow internet.
We see headlines about this-- about the Israeli firm that was abusing this, for instance, to hit targets-- and I am left scratching my head. Of course...?
IMHO it's the duty of any techie (with the social capital to influence digital hygiene) to ensure they and theirs are set up with at least ublock lite.
> It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.
I’m not sure about that. I suspect people don’t like how intrusive ads are. Especially in videos.
The security issue strikes me as a post Adblock rationalisation. People know how the sites they visit are funded and need some way to justify cutting that off.
The number who understand the security implications is going to be very small.
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought
They probably have data on return rates and the brand/model people buy after returning? Or are you saying they show you the exact same brand/model you just bought? That would be weird, unless it’s a consumable.
"Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen."
This may be a case of a "speed bump" where they are giving an opportunity for the user to recognize/acknowledge the account that is signed into the device.
Google almost certainly uses stuff in your email to recommend ads to you. I had a very, very specific thing that was ongoing for a year or so and as soon as I sent someone an email about it last week, a lot of ads starting showing up for that very specific, not common situation on YouTube.
Yeah, the fact that too many websites just ignore language settings/preferences (both system, and browser it seems) is really annoying. Location-based language picking doesn't even make sense in some locations. Like ebay not even giving an option to switch from German to anything else, if you are in Switzerland. They seem to be unaware that Switzerland is a multilingual country?
Recently I had my AIs do a massive deep-dive into all traffic going into and out of my phone. The amount of analytics and data being collected is absurd. Even the Android launcher app I use (Nova) is essentially controlled by an analytics company. Everything you do, even on your home screen, is sent to their servers.
This! I don't mind tech companies knowing things about me. If I don't want them to know, I browse in Safari's anonymous mode.
But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying.
I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't want my computer suggesting anything to me unless I ask it for suggestions. A computer should be essentially a REPL. It waits for a command. The user inputs its command. The computer processes it. Then the computer loops back to wait. Now we have all sorts of nice GUIs and modes of interaction, but essentially the computer should behave that way: The user should tell it what to do, and it should only do what the user wants.
Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.
We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.
The issue of you already buying something is interesting to me. It’s so obvious that they’d fix it if it cause revenue loss. My guess is that conversion for any ad is so low that you’re indeed more likely to buy a lot of products twice rather than buying something totally different.
You want them to advertise things you won’t buy; that’s far less bad than them advertising things you shouldn’t buy but might if pushed, which is the ultimate goal of the corporate mind control machine.
You think of it as the corporate mind control machine. I think of it as "oh, I am looking for a new car and completely forgot Subaru is also making cars that fit my profile - I should test drive them as well".
That's not always good. If I am looking for a kind of product, and an ad recommends a possibly better product that I didn't know about, both sides benefit from it.
I think they theory is that you are more likely to have some sort of buyers remorse and return that toaster and buy a new one than a baseline person is to suddenly buy a toaster.
I'm not sure if that's true, but that's the theory.
I turned on personalized advertising on my google phone once hoping to get actually related ads. It did change ads, but after a while I realized I was having hard time ignoring ads. I turned it off.
Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)
Well informed technical people should have the right to ensure what their liqueur store and pharmacy receipts are shared with their insurance provider to accurately model risks so their rates increase if that is what they want. Everyone is entitled to their kinks.
But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.
Not even tracking, but when I land on a page from a Google search, some sites try to be helpful by steering me to a local site, but the local link does not exist so I end up on the homepage, not the specific help I was looking for.
My favorite waste of ad money I see is google maps constantly putting "Dollar Tree" as a suggested/sponsored search. Problem is the closest dollar tree is 100KM away.
> I get shown ads for products I just purchased. All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".
You know, I had a really long argument about a decade ago with an Amazon senior engineer on the ads side of things about this. I was complaining about repeatedly being shown ads for the same blender I had just purchased (not accessories, not competing products, the exact same blender). And I hit a brick wall of "everybody complains about this, and we've been trying to change this, but every change to this makes the metrics worse".
My guess is that it's good for repeat purchases. You bought that blender, and if you really liked it, here is an ad to remind you of that model again, just in case you want to buy it as a gift for your relatives, or if you just want to buy a spare or something
Maybe Amazon's generous return policy means people are willing to swap products if shown alternative ones. But surely they already take this into account?
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, at least some of the people running ads must be competent, right? I have trouble believing that it's just a flawed incentive structure the whole way down...
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
There are some remotes that can be programmed to automatically send a "select this" code I think, to automate having to do this every time (was researching something like this recently so just mentioning I think it exists, don't know a lot about it)
A very odd stance. Personally if I'm going to be tracked and advertised to I want it to be things I have absolutely no interest in, even better if it's in a language I don't speak.
Amazon's recommendation system did this. It would sometimes show random products to make people think the system wasn't as good as it was and to generate funny social media posts featuring Amazon. That's the origin of "people who bought this also bought [unrelated product]" screenshots.
What surprises me is that this is state of affairs for Google, a company with unlimited budget - to show you ads for things you expressed just a slightest interest in or have already purchased. And it's a state for a loooooong time.
Like - I just purchased some plants from Dibleys, a plant nursery in UK. I've gotten confirmation email to my gmail account. Now I'm served plant ads for that very same company. I'd expect that The Algorithm would be smart to decide "hey, here is a guy that is interested in plants, let's take a look at other people in his age group and occupation, what are they also interested in, and let's serve him ads for that. Or having failed that ads for other plant nurseries in UK". But no! It's astounding, that it's so utterly mindlessly stupid.
But you know what, actually I prefer that there's no computational effort here. Maybe this means that me being served a shitty ad for a company I like and already know will not attribute to global warming. Maybe this means that Dibleys isn't being charged for a clickthrough, but for impressions that cost a lot less. Maybe this cyclical stupidity is something that we're stuck with as a human race, because why the fuck should an ad serve some kind of purpose.
This is so true - my favorite is when I have hard time to buy something and after I buy my dream thing, the flood of adds with better deals kill my happiness for getting it cheaply:-)
I don't understand the skepticism that people who bought something are more likely than a randomly selected person to buy another one of that kind of thing. Yes, even stuff like mattresses. If you think about it for more than ten seconds it should be obvious why this is true.
Yeah, I don't see the issue there. Some people buy a mattress, don't like it, and then buy another different mattress. Some people like the mattress they bought for their kid so much they buy a similar one for themselves. Some people like the mattress they bought for their rental house so they buy one for their primary residence. And so on. Sure, it might not be super likely that someone buys multiple mattresses in a short period of time, but if someone has mattress buying on the brain, it is possible.
I don't think people assume there is literally zero signal. I think their intuition is that the repurchase rate is low. Low enough that that if the advertiser knew the purchase was made, then the advertiser would serve something else with a higher predicted chance of getting a click.
It's easy to assign a straw-man a belief there is zero signal and talk down to it. The more nuanced idea that is less obvious goes like this: advertising is such a boondoggle that the aforementioned weak signal actually does represent a higher click-through than everything else in their ad inventory.
Advertisers working in predictive targeting like to tell tall tails about their analytical genius. That story about the Target ad campaign predicting someone was pregnant is their ur myth. The basis for their big swinging statistical analysis prowess. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to their carefully crafted image if they had to admit the peak of their profession is hoping people need a 2nd of something that's usually a less-than-once-a-year purchase.
Just so I don't get accused of shilling out of self-interest, I don't work (and never have) in advertisements in any way shape or form, nor does my employer make a dime from advertising. This advertising discussion always ends up with two sides: "so what?" and "advertising in any form is evil and everyone involved in it deserves the death penalty" (hyperbole but not by as much as you'd think).
What the former side ignores very often is that there are scam ads to scam websites that are basically malware. The ads with fake sign up buttons, the flashing ads saying you've won money, basically any video ad I've ever seen. They're garbage.
What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.
> What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.
My agency is removed when the mechanisms used to serve those ads aggressively invade my privacy and surveil pretty much any and every activity I do in daily life. This happens regardless of whether I click the ad or not. How does one miss this side of the argument? And no, "use an adblocker" or "use ublock origin" does not fix the problem.
I'm not even talking about the adtech surveillance aspect of it. The discussion is often about how advertising itself is, at its core or "fRoM fIRsT prInCiPLeS" or whatever, a Bad Thing. If I'm going to see ads I'd rather see ads for a specific product I might actually want to buy than for products I have no interest in or generic "hey did you know Coca-Cola exists?" brand ad nonsense. I'd love it if that happened without invasive surveillance or Samsung-level malware but I think that's besides the point.
But to your point, what agency of yours is removed when you buy a product known to actively spy on you, you take no measures to stop it, and that ends up with you being shown ads based on whatever you were browsing?
You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of adtech and the mechanisms surrounding it. I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive, but it goes much deeper than "I bought a product and am being tracked." Everything digital collects information from you, with the primary purpose of selling the data to advertisers that target based on that data. It's not, "I bought a smartfridge, so I get what I deserve." It's "I went to mcdonald's, my friend used the mcdonald's app, now mcdonald's knows a ton of shit about me and I will be served ads based on it." I do not want Mcdonald's to know anything about me. That is the agency I am losing, because I cannot do much about it. You may think that's harmless, but there's been articles written about how McDonald's in particular has so much ability to surveil they basically can see like a state. Or stories like this: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossi...
There is no opting out without entirely opting out of every day life. Whatever viewpoint you're coming from always seems completely oblivious to this.
I worked for Google for 10 years. All of my personal email and all of my work email (back then, Google, now CMU) goes through Gmail. They know basically everything that's ever been sent as a receipt in an email. They know what I watch on YouTube, what I search for Google, and Android's little Google rootkit knows everywhere I go, and by extension, everyone I hang out with. They know I install an adblocker everywhere I can. I rail against advertising and tracking on the internet (this site) all the time.
Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite.
...and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).
I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.
Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!
i worked at google for 18 years. they certainly "know" you don't like ads, and they definitely don't care. they may also "know" your consumer account is a safe place to dump all the non-converting impressions they need to burn somewhere, but even if you could prove that, they wouldn't care. tbh, whenever somebody comes at me with tin foil hat assertions i point to this exact hilarious scenario as why i do not believe they are actually surveillance-oriented business a la the palantirs of the world. i think their ideal state is 100 trillion anonymous bank accounts they can pull from, not 8 billion unique human profiles to care about.
Google's culture is to just burn ungodly amounts of disk space as a kind of flex for how important a team's project is. So every Google service is collecting as much as it can, all the time, with legal counsel and some "oh we value your privacy" sophistry going on.
If you still work for Google I recommend reading privacy design docs for random large scale services if you're able. It's very telling what the priorities are.
And I agree that they mostly don't want to be Palantir-like. They mostly don't care about people. They care about advertisers. Any new targeting mechanism they can offer advertisers they absolutely will. The problem is they sit on a gold mine of very, very sensitive personal data (most of it "anonymized"). Most of it can be de-anonymized with little work. Worse, they will absolutely cough it up to the government when required. They also have a lot of motivated engineers thinking of ways to try to use said data to "improve products". Like the whole saga of doing activity inference for Android users. You don't even want to know about how stupid and creepy that is/was.
I think you're missing the point of ads. They're not (only) there so you click on them and buy something, they're there because it implants the brand into your mind.
"one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years"
And the one time you need some random specific insurance, what are you going to think about?
The answer to this is not better information for better ads. It's a Pi-hole or other DNS level ad blocking + uBlock origin.
I think that in theory, advertising based monetization is fine, but practically speaking, the incentives are so terrible that it invariably leads to bad outcomes. The reality of our ad-supported web is unsustainable and unacceptable and it needs to die. This does mean that lots of things will go away, and that we will be paying for a lot more things, but that's far preferable to the current state of the internet.
> All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".
Amazon surely have some ofthe best engineers in the world, and it's surprisng they can't figure out this problem. No, now that I have purchased a fridge, I don't want to buy a second fridge.
On YouTube, I get the same rotation of 3 ads almost constantly. A shampoo that I have no interest in, a detergent that I used to have (but no longer, because I associate with spam), and a dusting brush (I had no idea these things still existed!)
Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.
So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.
If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.
The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.
GDPR is limited to companies that have a presence in the EU, or are directed at EU citizens. When you browse the world wide web, you rarely stay only in Europe. Some sites will respect the GDPR, some will block you, and some just don't care.
I've been making this point for at least 10y, and I think it's gotten 0% better. It's already infuriating how much data is collected about me against my will and any sense of ethics, but it makes me LIVID that all this invasion of privacy has completely shit results. Pretty sure I'd be more sensitive to advertising if it was fully random, at least I'd see stuff I was curious about or didn't expect I'd be interested in, instead of myriads of variations of things I already bought or that are adjacent to something I bought (and therefore I already have too).
> My user account, system locale, browser locale, and keyboard settings are all set to English. I am logged into Chrome and all Google services. I travel to Germany every few months, and lots of services that I've been using for years suddenly decide I speak German.
This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.
It does not. My point was that even with excessive tracking these companies are incapable of showing me stuff I can read or advertising me things I can, even in theory, buy.
Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.
Same, so I always use the Subscriptions tab to see just what I have subscribed to. But of course, just this week they have hidden it. It's still there fortunately, but you have to dig for it.
Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people -
If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise.
Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless.
Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?
You can be certain that they are using that data. The truth is that the data being collected about you is not intended to benefit you, it's being gathered and stored and sold to be used against you in any way that the person with that data feels might be an advantage for them.
It's not really about showing you relevant ads, or helpful recommendations, or useful product offerings. It hasn't been about any of those things for a very long time now. Your data will still be used that way, but while companies will tell you that is mainly why they collect your data that is a lie. Those are secondary uses for your data and making those things work well for your benefit is a cost to the companies and they are only willing to invest so much time/money/effort into that.
Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense, and where it isn't being used today, it's being stored for a time in the future when it can be used more effectively against you. AI promises to make it easier than ever to trawl through all that data and find ways to leverage it to better manipulate you, or take more of your money from you, or further limit any possible risk you might expose a company to.
Companies don't want you to be aware of when and how that data is being used, so it's natural for you to feel like it's all being ignored, but you can sure that a lot of work is going into finding new and creative ways to put all that data to use.
Same here.
I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.
I just disabled my adblocker on the BBC website out of curiosity and oh am I happy I don't live like this.
What's freaky is there are people who actually like the ads.
Granted, many of us enjoy the kooky ads that occur during the Super Bowl. That's not really what I'm talking about. I've met people who say they enjoy midroll ads in videos and podcasts. There are even folks who like banner ads. To me, those all represent precious seconds that add up to countless hours of my life wasted, which I will never get back. The more ads I avoid, the more opportunity to experience life I have.
Another horrible thing about ads in general is they distract one from being alone with their own thoughts. A lot of people are too afraid to spend time alone with their own thoughts, so in a sense they might enjoy the fact that any sensory input can take them away from that. To me, modern ads are thought vampires. It might be one thing if ads focused on the merits of products, and if most products today were of quality and a fair price, except that is not the norm.
But I enjoy creative ads thanks to growing up watching the french tv show Culture Pub: https://www.culturepub.fr/annee-chapitre/2007/
For example, insight into the french advertisement culture makes you appreciate the full depth of the movie "99 francs": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0875113/
- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.
- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? Not everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.
ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.
Not sure why we got to this point. If there had only been video game ads on my video game site I wouldn't have had to resort to adblocking back in - checks calendar - 2007.
Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”
But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things
I always try to avoid ads as much as possible and not having any social media really helps. But going to use this remark from now on.
They are throwing many different strategies out there through many different avenues and banking one the one that just happens to pull in a new chunk of buyers. It’s like lower-stakes gambling.
If I make let's say a children's toy, how am I supposed to let people know that this new type of toy even exists? That WHOLE process is advertising, no? Whether I give these toys away for free at a Santa Clause parade, pay department stores to put my toy in prominent shelves, or buy space on Cartoon Network.
How do you get even a single buyer without advertising?
That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.
> Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
yes this is right and why the parent is totally off base
> That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
This is totally wrong. Ads targeting "algorithms" are some of the most complicated systems on earth. First of all, it is completely done by machine learning models now not simple algorithms, and within companies who are doing ads targeting well (ie, Google, Meta, Tiktok, and if you want to go down the list to the less competent companies then you can include X and Reddit and others) there is massive internal pressure and competition to get any edge by either improving models or other parts of the ads targeting stack. The top dogs as in Tiktok, Google Search, and Meta have been posting 10+% yoy ads revenue numbers for many years now with a much smaller increase or even flatlining user counts. It's all due to improvements in the ads stack making them more effective and more useful for advertisers (and they and the article in the post would say users as well but HN mostly doesn't subscribe to this viewpoint) driving more total ads spend and a growing economy.
My perception is that your job is to build a model to psychologically profile people at scale to manipulate them into buying stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. Now, first of all, that seems incredibly unsettling to me in its own right already.
But where it gets really unsettling is if you think even a little bit past the immediate usecase: Once you have this sort of model, who knows what sort of other stuff you can manipulate people into? Should people like Zuckerberg really have the power to do this? And if you trust Zuckerberg, what about other players? Say an authoritarian state somehow managed to get control over these models. Doesn't it seem like you're building an incredibly dangerous thing here?
Wonder how you feel about these things and if you've ever had similar concerns. Like, I get that there's probably all sorts of interesting engineering problems involved. But one could say the same thing about von Braun building the V2 - these things aren't just puzzles in isolation!
Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is an important point: advertisers don't really lose much by showing you ads you don't want, so it's unlikely the system would ever become ultra-precise.
What people seem to be looking for is not targeted advertising but targeted recommendations - where vendor "spend" can't skew the results to show you crap you don't want. But that's a product the consumer and not the vendor would have to pay for, by definition. Unfortunately consumers don't have deep enough pockets to make this kind of thing lucrative over just selling ads.
There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.
It's an entirely soulless process, which makes my extensive ad-blocking regime entirely justified the same way that walking off of a beaten path in the woods is justified.
On the flip side I only give cash and they all complain its not very thoughtful, no matter how nice the Hallmark money card.
I have bought a number of $50-$100 things that are advertised to me on Instagram. I think I bought a $1,000 piece of furniture once.
Instagram ads are perfectly targeted to me. I am sometimes amazed at how often they show me good products that I legitimately want to buy - often niche, unique products from companies I didn't know existed. Obviously they are combining information from other sites I visit, because the accounts I follow on Instagram have nothing to do with any products.
Targeted ads in this setting are quite useful and pleasant for me! I wish Meta all the best in making them even better. I'm sure they are also super useful for the small businesses making the products I buy, because they can build awareness much more cost-effectively than other mechanisms.
Yes, I agree that when I visit my local news sites and see "targeted" ads for sports gambling, "800 singles in your area", or other nonsense I'm not interested in, it's pretty unpleasant. But those are just shitty ads.
Im not sure if you mean “coerce” literally but if so this is overkill. Maybe “persuade” or to be more critical, “manipulate”?
It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So while Google is trying to get me to buy discrete transistors and push cart tires (work related stuff), Meta is trying to get me to buy bespoke Icelandic wool socks, artisan gummy edibles, and hand made ceramic table ware.
A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.
I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.
I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.
Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
As an aside, there is exactly one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations. Because for whatever reason they advertise a lot of cultural events (concerts, festivals, plays, etc).
Isn't the point of those, that in the end, the likelihood of you buying something again just recently bought might be tiny, but is probably still bigger than showing the same add to a random other person?
The effect is quite strong.
Humans are stupid and fail to make logical decisions, instead they reinforce and justify their previous ones.
Showing you the product you purchased is the best way to get you to transfer your purchase decision to purchase additional other products.
Back in the bad old days of adobe and flash plugins in Internet explorer, malicious ads targetting those were the malware infection vector in something like 80% of cases. Browsers have gotten better, but it remains the case that ad networks are the single easiest way to inject your mal-content into another website.
In those days, any time I handled a client call about malware, I replaced everything with Chrome (built in pdf viewer, sandboxed/autoupdated flash) and adblock plus. And then, my calls from those users stopped being about malware or slow internet.
We see headlines about this-- about the Israeli firm that was abusing this, for instance, to hit targets-- and I am left scratching my head. Of course...?
IMHO it's the duty of any techie (with the social capital to influence digital hygiene) to ensure they and theirs are set up with at least ublock lite.
I’m not sure about that. I suspect people don’t like how intrusive ads are. Especially in videos.
The security issue strikes me as a post Adblock rationalisation. People know how the sites they visit are funded and need some way to justify cutting that off.
The number who understand the security implications is going to be very small.
They probably have data on return rates and the brand/model people buy after returning? Or are you saying they show you the exact same brand/model you just bought? That would be weird, unless it’s a consumable.
1) and a lot of them prefer them to be gone
2) why it would be a hard truth? I am not expecting that everyone will match my preferences
I suspect that Amazon somehow get paid for "impressions" by the ad originator.
(it looks very much like a standard enshitification pattern : 1) gain market dominance, 2) screw the users 3) screw the business customers )
Programmers :-D
In the sense that you aren’t able to build an immune system against it.
But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying. I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.
Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.
We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.
I'm not sure if that's true, but that's the theory.
Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)
But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.
Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.
Subject: 6MONTHS OF'COVERA.GE'START.ING.AT $2
From: RR_BANKAI.NET.bankai.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.RR_BANKAIdb@ad288.com
You know, I had a really long argument about a decade ago with an Amazon senior engineer on the ads side of things about this. I was complaining about repeatedly being shown ads for the same blender I had just purchased (not accessories, not competing products, the exact same blender). And I hit a brick wall of "everybody complains about this, and we've been trying to change this, but every change to this makes the metrics worse".
There are some remotes that can be programmed to automatically send a "select this" code I think, to automate having to do this every time (was researching something like this recently so just mentioning I think it exists, don't know a lot about it)
Like - I just purchased some plants from Dibleys, a plant nursery in UK. I've gotten confirmation email to my gmail account. Now I'm served plant ads for that very same company. I'd expect that The Algorithm would be smart to decide "hey, here is a guy that is interested in plants, let's take a look at other people in his age group and occupation, what are they also interested in, and let's serve him ads for that. Or having failed that ads for other plant nurseries in UK". But no! It's astounding, that it's so utterly mindlessly stupid.
But you know what, actually I prefer that there's no computational effort here. Maybe this means that me being served a shitty ad for a company I like and already know will not attribute to global warming. Maybe this means that Dibleys isn't being charged for a clickthrough, but for impressions that cost a lot less. Maybe this cyclical stupidity is something that we're stuck with as a human race, because why the fuck should an ad serve some kind of purpose.
It's easy to assign a straw-man a belief there is zero signal and talk down to it. The more nuanced idea that is less obvious goes like this: advertising is such a boondoggle that the aforementioned weak signal actually does represent a higher click-through than everything else in their ad inventory.
Advertisers working in predictive targeting like to tell tall tails about their analytical genius. That story about the Target ad campaign predicting someone was pregnant is their ur myth. The basis for their big swinging statistical analysis prowess. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to their carefully crafted image if they had to admit the peak of their profession is hoping people need a 2nd of something that's usually a less-than-once-a-year purchase.
"I wish the farmer knew more about me, it gives me corn but what I want is sunlight !"
What the former side ignores very often is that there are scam ads to scam websites that are basically malware. The ads with fake sign up buttons, the flashing ads saying you've won money, basically any video ad I've ever seen. They're garbage.
What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.
My agency is removed when the mechanisms used to serve those ads aggressively invade my privacy and surveil pretty much any and every activity I do in daily life. This happens regardless of whether I click the ad or not. How does one miss this side of the argument? And no, "use an adblocker" or "use ublock origin" does not fix the problem.
But to your point, what agency of yours is removed when you buy a product known to actively spy on you, you take no measures to stop it, and that ends up with you being shown ads based on whatever you were browsing?
There is no opting out without entirely opting out of every day life. Whatever viewpoint you're coming from always seems completely oblivious to this.
Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite.
...and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).
I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.
Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!
If you still work for Google I recommend reading privacy design docs for random large scale services if you're able. It's very telling what the priorities are.
And I agree that they mostly don't want to be Palantir-like. They mostly don't care about people. They care about advertisers. Any new targeting mechanism they can offer advertisers they absolutely will. The problem is they sit on a gold mine of very, very sensitive personal data (most of it "anonymized"). Most of it can be de-anonymized with little work. Worse, they will absolutely cough it up to the government when required. They also have a lot of motivated engineers thinking of ways to try to use said data to "improve products". Like the whole saga of doing activity inference for Android users. You don't even want to know about how stupid and creepy that is/was.
"one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years"
And the one time you need some random specific insurance, what are you going to think about?
I think that in theory, advertising based monetization is fine, but practically speaking, the incentives are so terrible that it invariably leads to bad outcomes. The reality of our ad-supported web is unsustainable and unacceptable and it needs to die. This does mean that lots of things will go away, and that we will be paying for a lot more things, but that's far preferable to the current state of the internet.
Amazon surely have some ofthe best engineers in the world, and it's surprisng they can't figure out this problem. No, now that I have purchased a fridge, I don't want to buy a second fridge.
Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.
So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.
If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.
The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.
I do not want ads matching my weaknesses and likely to convince me to buy anything.
I saw an ad for $30 water proof shoes at Costco.
I have no illusion that these are the most comfortable/durable shoe in the world, but I do believe that they are $30 and water proof.
I didn't know they existed because they are online only. But I'm very glad I saw this ad, especially with the el nino season coming up in california
Doing it online, even with free returns, would be far more annoying.
I'm saying I didn't know those shoes existed, especially at that price point.
Are you claiming that you are fully aware of all the products in the world that would be a benefit to you?
Its a discovery problem, not a fulfillment problem.
This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.
Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?