These are two companies.
Who sell you as a consumer to vast ad agencies and make a profit off your doom scrolling.
Not quite, these two are the vast ad agencies.
We are lucky to still have 2 choices
Here’s the fun part, they don’t need to listen to you. You are far more predictable than you realize. They already know everything about you, what you search, what apps you use, what kinds of exercise you do and when, what you eat, what articles you read, movies and podcasts you consume, music you listen to, what you buy, where you go, who you hang out with, and everything about the people you hang out with. Every minute of your life is meticulously tracked and analyzed and compared to the hundred thousand people who are just like you in terms of interests and patterns. They can predict to a scary degree what your thinking before you might even realize it yourself. They know you better than you know yourself. Why waste the resources sifting through hours of recordings when they already know everything going on in your head from the million data points you voluntarily transmit to them everyday?
The other part of this to keep in mind is that you are bombarded with ads all day most of which you ignore. It’s just that those few times where they manage to hit a straight bullseye, showing you an add for something you were just talking about or even just thinking about, those are the ones that will stick in your memory.
Please, please, please, can people just understand this?! It’s infuriating hearing all these conspiracies when in reality, it’s so much simpler to just use the data we already know they collect.
Nah, none of this explains the Lemonbalm Tea incident.
I assure you, the Lemonbalm Tea incident does not require further explanation than “whatever many steps you think is the answer, you can add plus 2 to it and still come up short”.
I cannot replicate any of these claims no matter how hard I try. I ran out of contact solution this weekend and I spent a good 20 minutes repeating the words “contact solution” “contact solution delivery” “1-800-contacts” "I need contact solution " with Facebook open, directly into the microphone. All I get are vaguely relevant ads for shit I obviously would want (bike parts and bikes because, spoiler alert, I use FB almost exclusively to keep up with local mountain bike events) and absolutely nothing about contacts or contact solution.
But guess what? This still doesn’t prove anything because, like your example, it’s an anecdote. And a single anecdote counts for fuck all in terms of evidence. I find it exceedingly unlikely that any of the tech giants are wasting time and resources listening in on our conversations simply to target us with advertisements when they already have sufficient data based on past search history, app usage statistics, our friend groups, location data, demographic data, …
This stupid conspiracy is just as illogical as the vaccine tracking chip conspiracy. Hello, you are voluntarily carrying a tracking device you bought with your own money and keep charged with your own power, and you willingly expose even more data to it like private messages and photos. There’s absolutely no reason to invent GPS tracking nano technology to solve an already solved problem.
And I by no means am saying that these big tech companies are innocent or that they don’t abuse the data they collect. There’s a 100% chance they do. But you are ascribing a level of sophistication they don’t really need to “read your mind” or listen in on your private conversations. You are human, and they have a few billion other examples of humans they can use to analyze behavior. We’re pretty predictable, it turns out.
There is no “lemon balm incident” that even bears worth putting on the Internet after a quick google search. You’re talking out your ass so can it.
then how do you explain facebook giving people ads for stuff they say
eg. this youtuber made an experiment where he wasn’t getting ads for oven and when he started saying oven multiple times, he got ads for oven https://youtu.be/-nkiPEGU_lYOr Facebook recommending people that I’ve talked to by text and never met irl (met on dating app, moved to text, fizzled out) when it’s not supposed to have access to my contacts.
The video you linked would be stupid easy to reproduce by recording a voice over after scrolling ads on Facebook for a minute. If you want to convince me, you would need to perform a controlled experiment with multiple unrelated search terms, fresh Facebook accounts with no browsing history, etc.
Or, what if this is real? Maybe the YouTuber wasn’t just phishing for view counts with clickbait to boost his channel and actually did make that video in good faith and sure enough, Bluetooth speakers show up in his feed? What’s to say he hasn’t been seeing Bluetooth speaker ads because he’s a tech inclined, middle aged man with disposable income and the opposite effect is true: maybe he subconsciously chose Bluetooth speakers because he’s been seeing ads for them on Facebook recently? Our minds aren’t exactly good at keeping track of that kind of thing and advertisers take advantage of that shit all the time. Look at the familiarity principle or mere exposure effect.
My point isn’t to say Facebook and Google don’t collect tons of data about us, they do that all the time for sure. It’s just that there are simpler, more reliable and less processor intensive ways to build a behavioral model. Google knows where I work, what I search for, how old I am, how many kids I have, what YouTube videos I watch, … There’s more than enough there to figure out what kind of ads to serve me.
Dumb take is dumb
This is such a fucking dumb comment lol.
NGL this is driving me crazy. Without searching for things, just talking about them, they start showing up in ads. Even in places that don’t have google/alexa speakers.
At this point, I’m reaching full-tinfoil and think they have a voice chip installed under my skinl…
One time I was in a car with some people, and the clouds looked really nice, and out loud I said “I wonder what kind of clouds those are? Are they like cumulus? I don’t even know all the types of clouds” or something along those lines. About a minute later, I take my phone out to look it up and I type “What kind of” and the google auto-fill was “clouds are those” and I was like "There’s absolutely no way that my phone is not listening to me at all times. I do not believe for one second that the most popular search is “What kind of clouds are those”. That was very very specific to what I had just said out loud.
I’m usually not one for tinfoil hats, but this is very difficult to explain.
The most likely situation is that it used the GPS data that it scrapes from you to recognize you’re in a car. Then uses their internal knowledge to know that most of the time when other users are in cars and Google “what kind of” they are asking about clouds.
Still hoovering up way too much personal data.
Or that people around had already been googling this question very recently.
Yeah it’s definitely just regional popular searches for this situation
Similar story with me. In my car with my friends. I have never listened to Bob Marley, nor his genre of music. I have never had a reason to look him up. Anyways, through or random conversations, we got to talking about him and wondering how he died. We came up with a few theories before I decided to grab my phone and Google it. I literally just pressed ‘H’ and wouldn’t you know it, the first suggestion was “How did Bob Marley die?” Needless to say I was creeped the fuck out after that
I just did some volunteer work to help some flood wreckage.
We were using these generic ass storage totes to package shit up in and help people move out or whatever.
Me and like 5 other people all had ads for the generic totes.
I figure it was like "YO THAT GUY THAT BOUGHT 100,000 TOTES IS HANGING OUT WITH THESE GUYS, MAYBE THEY WANT 100,000 TOTES TOO??!
anyways welcome to the future it sucks.
I like how I bought a vacuum months ago and everything keeps advertising them at me. I already got one! How many damn vacuums do you people think someone needs? Because the answer is almost never more than one. If they’re collecting my data they should also be well aware that there’s no way in hell I’m dropping $1k on a Dyson lmao
That’s hilarious, but more than likely that’s exactly what happened. I listened to someone explain the process on a podcast recently, can’t remember which one maybe the Vergecast or vox today explained. But the example they used is you go to a country club you hang out with a friend who just bought a Porsche or whatever. They use your phones location to know you are always going to this location and sticking within a few feet of this other phone, the owner of which has the new Porsche. Well they figure that’s your friend and he’s probably talking up his porche, and your in the right demographic to buy a Porsche and you haven’t bought a new car in x years, so guess what now you get Porsche ads. So what you described perfectly fits that example, they figured you’d all be suckers for some totes.
Shhhh!!! My husband still doesn’t know it’s my fault he’s been getting manga ads and I can’t make fun of him for having anime boyfriends if he finds out. Even worse. He’ll be in a position to make fun of me AND he’ll get to be smug about it. This is my life hanging in the balance here 🥺
You sit on a teetering throne of lies!
Also apple watching through the window and having “exclusive” rights to sell the same data.
Wasting multiple options by repeating both companies twice…
Uninstall Facebook, install AeroInsta and YouTube Revanced, and use DuckDuckGo
Is there a app like AeroInsta but just for Facebook Marketplace? Where I live, it’s the only way people sell used things
How often do you use it? I’d just use a browser if possible
Unfortunately I need it daily for work ;/
I’d love an alternative, but… You know. Gotta pay the bills and share my life with the zuck
That’s why I don’t delete my account. It’s thankfully rare anymore but I have to use it for ad reports occasionally
does aeroinsta and revanced make any privacy improvements?
I’d say to use newpipe for youtube as it is better for privacy(uses youtube scraping instead of official api so youtube gets minimal telemetry back from you) and insta lite as it is focused on cheap phones so it probably has less trackers for smoothness
also they aren’t as visually pleasing so you won’t be addicted to doomscrolling (instsagram lite on purpose shows you only posts from last 3 days on your feed)AeroInsta outright blocks the trackers. I’ve never seen a search related content on Instagram because of it.
Revanced, alongside paused history and opt out of ad personalisation, keeps entire history to yourself.
Even YouTube on web can only recommend videos based on my subscription and nothing else.
I periodically say random product names or search for things id have no use for just to see how far and wide it goes…it’s bad.
One time a buddy and I were talking about cars, a Toyota supra came up. I haven’t said that phrase since gran Turismo in the 90s. Ad the next day
If it was just that, it wouldn’t even bother me all that much. But we know it’s more than that and they still want way more
To be honest even after listening to all shits, they suggest me stupid things which I don’t even care about.
I’m glad we meet here, on the fediverse 👍
So many of you are on Lemmy and have ZERO privacy awareness. Gtfo please and leave the actual techies alone.
This isn’t “hopeless” you fuckers. DuckDuckGo how to protect yourself from things like this photo.
