Little Things That Irk You: The Hateful 08

[wakka]

I thought it would be something related to your work like that.

One thing I would say is that you can now use IG through a web browser - so you could go that route if you wanted to delete it.

[QualityChimp]

(ADVERT) Trying to wa(ADVERT)tch a video on You(ADVERT 1 OF 2)(ADVERT 2 OF 2)Tube.

[Asura]

One for Asura’s “they’re just predicting it, they’re not listening” books. Was talking to a colleague yesterday about a friend’s kid who has diabetes. Today Instagram is serving me up ads for blood monitoring devices. No they have never done this before. No it’s not coincidence.

I should say that I got a load of ads for diabetes monitoring stuff a couple of weeks ago too, despite not having talked about that with anyone.

EDIT: Incidentally, I'm not saying"these services are definitely not listening to you at all times", because I don't work for them and couldn't possibly know that. I'm just saying that I don't personally think they are, and that I don't think they would need to listen to people to make all of these connections.

Like I just went onto Eurogamer and got 2 ads, both for Nikon's new cameras. I just talked to [MENTION=16665]Blobcat[/MENTION] about her new camera yesterday - but I bought that camera a month ago after looking up reviews of it. Eurogamer is part of Google's audience network and likely so were the websites on which I read reviews.

[Dogg Thang]

Yeah, mad how that keeps happening.

[Asura]

Yeah, mad how that keeps happening.

It does seem like an absurd coincidence, but really, you're exposed to hundreds of ads a day. You tune nearly all of them out, but the ones you notice are the ones which strike a chord with you, and in this case, that Diabetes ad did because of your earlier conversation.

I just wish I'd stop getting ads for Grammarly. I get ads for them everywhere because I do a lot of creative writing.

[Dogg Thang]

Dude, you really need to stop telling me what I notice. You have zero idea about what I notice. I am on Insta every single day for art and have a very clear idea of what ads are served up and when and have had for a very long time. Years. Every single day. This is not a new thing. Not something I just spot now and again. It’s a clear pattern. And I’m a very healthy guy in good shape. There is no algorithm based on my information that will tell any system to serve up a diabetes monitor randomly that just happens to land 24 hours after I was talking about it. You can beat your coincidence drum all you like but you’ve got to stop assuming you have any idea what is served up on my Instagram and that I might not actually notice what’s on it.

[Cassius_Smoke]

(ADVERT) Trying to wa(ADVERT)tch a video on You(ADVERT 1 OF 2)(ADVERT 2 OF 2)Tube.

Get YouTube Vanced. No adverts anymore.

[Asura]

Dude, you really need to stop telling me what I notice. You have zero idea about what I notice. I am on Insta every single day for art and have a very clear idea of what ads are served up and when and have had for a very long time. Years. Every single day. This is not a new thing. Not something I just spot now and again. It’s a clear pattern. And I’m a very healthy guy in good shape. There is no algorithm based on my information that will tell any system to serve up a diabetes monitor randomly that just happens to land 24 hours after I was talking about it. You can beat your coincidence drum all you like but you’ve got to stop assuming you have any idea what is served up on my Instagram and that I might not actually notice what’s on it.

Fine, this is the last time I'll talk to you about it.

EDIT: Realised I jumped down your throat a bit. Apologies.

[randombs]

There is no algorithm based on my information that will tell any system to serve up a diabetes monitor randomly that just happens to land 24 hours after I was talking about it.

I’m starting to think the truth lies somewhere between (a) spotting things that are fresh in your mind and (b) straight-up eavesdropping.

(a) Every time I have a Japanese lesson on a particular grammar point, I’ll see an example of it on TV the very same day. It was always there, but I’d been missing it until I learned it.

I’ve been wondering if FB gets the information not from our microphones, but from the person we’re discussing these things with. If you’re friends with that person on FB(or another service that hooks into FB) and they searched diabetes monitors after talking to you, FB may have gleaned through other means that you were also discussing them.

I remember reading a while back that these companies could figure out your location if you were near to someone else who was being tracked because their phone would be collecting Bluetooth MAC addresses of phones nearby(like how contact tracing works).

Having said that, here’s an example of (b) that freaked me out:

Last month I was FB video chatting with my family and briefly showed them a company-branded, insulated mug I’d got from work. I didn’t mention the company name or anything. Mum reminded me to drink lots of water so I showed her the mug as proof as proof that I was drinking lots of water

The next day, there was an advert in my FB newsfeed for products that company makes - including the mug!

https://www.hydroflask.com/12-oz-coffee-mug

[Brad]

(ADVERT) Trying to wa(ADVERT)tch a video on You(ADVERT 1 OF 2)(ADVERT 2 OF 2)Tube.

Following on from this does anyone know if there's a way to filter out videos where the guy in the thumbnail has hipster facial hair or is pulling a stupid face? I realised this would eliminate 99% of the videos and I'm fine with that.

[Dogg Thang]

I’ve been wondering if FB gets the information not from our microphones, but from the person we’re discussing these things with. If you’re friends with that person on FB(or another service that hooks into FB) and they searched diabetes monitors after talking to you, FB may have gleaned through other means that you were also discussing them.

That's a possibility. They have served up ads before that have been again way too close to be a coincidence (like your mug incident) but haven't been things actually mentioned and one thing I think happens is that they can serve up ads based on local wifi signals - a little like how my phone company used to send text messages with offers when I entered shopping centres (which now that I think about it was a regular occurrence but hasn't actually happened in years so I wonder why that stopped). So proximity to connections and making those links doesn't sound beyond the realms of possibility. However they are doing it, it's invasive.

[wakka]

The type of connection that randombs suggests sounds a lot more plausible to me than analysis of always-on microphone recording. Not that it isn’t technically possible or that FB isn’t sufficiently amoral to do it, just that I’ve always felt like if it emerged that they had been doing that, it would be pretty damaging - and that they probably had some sneakier way of getting to the same type of information that wouldn’t create quite such an outcry if it came to light.

Apologies if stating the obvious, and I don’t know if this is relevant or even interesting, but Facebook ads actually don’t have that many targeting parameters when you set them up. They work by showing ads to a broad range of people and then beginning to define a profile of the type of person likely to complete the advertiser’s objective (click, etc), based on who interacts with the ads.

As an advertiser this is all invisible, you can’t actually see the profile they are building or anything like that. Nor do they supply any information about how do this or what information goes into this invisible profile. They don’t even call it a profile - they just say, opaquely, that the ad is ‘learning’.

So what goes into that ‘learning’ is an open question. It certainly doesn’t sound outside the realms of possibility that they might think that two people sharing the same WiFi network for a while might share an interest in a given type of product.

And yes, it is invasive.

[Brad]

Can’t speak for Android but if an app on iPhone wants to use your microphone your phone will tell you and you can refuse it.

WiFi Mac addresses (a unique WiFi address) and your phone’s IMSI (a unique cellular identifier) are kept very separate. You can’t determine one from the other generally speaking. Also the vast majority of modern phones (last few years) will not divulge their real MAC address, they’ll use a random one.

So, what does this mean? It means that Facebook could serve you up ads based on your own online footprint (many sites contain Facebook cookies, even if they’re not actually Facebook sites). They can serve you up ads based on what your Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram friends are interested in, or what they think they’re interested in. They can’t listen to what you’re saying on your phone unless you say they can, and it’d be quite startling if your phone randomly said Facebook wants to use your microphone so we’d hear about that in the news so it’s safe to assume your friends also aren’t recording your conversations. WhatsApp is the outlier here. We’d expect to grant that access to our microphones but I still don’t think that’s what they’re doing.

Given Apple’s anti Facebook stance and the privacy technology they’re introducing and have already introduced I feel it’s safe to conclude that Facebook are using mass cookie tracking and correlation with AI to serve you the most relevant ads. It’s just terrifying how advanced their AI is.

Fwiw I don’t use Facebook or Twitter anymore and I never see ads that are related to me or anything in my life anymore and haven’t done for years now.

[teddymeow]

"Freedom Day"

You'd think we'd won a bloody war or something.

[Dogg Thang]

Not that it isn’t technically possible or that FB isn’t sufficiently amoral to do it, just that I’ve always felt like if it emerged that they had been doing that, it would be pretty damaging

I feel like we can move past this idea precisely because Facebook have been caught on transgressions on more than one occassion and that didn't stop other transgressions. In your words, FB have shown themselves to be sufficiently amoral and also not all that afraid of the consequences.

Although your point did bring up a question for me which is why FB? When you consider the access to info that Google have, for example, with the amount of people who use their products across the search engine, gmail, Chrome, Android. They have a serious amount of info but we don't often hear the same accusations levelled at them or Amazon or most other companies. However they are doing it (and obviously I can't say for certain at all how that is), FB give the impression time and time again that they are somehow crossing lines that these other companies don't cross. Anyway, I'm not sure how relevant that is but, given how much I use Google products, I do personally find it interesting that I don't find the same thing ever happening with them.

I feel it’s safe to conclude that Facebook are using mass cookie tracking and correlation with AI to serve you the most relevant ads. It’s just terrifying how advanced their AI is.

Yep, it is. But where it gets more terrifying for me is not the relevant ads, but the irrelevant ones - because, as with a diabetes tracker, nothing in my info would point to that ad but there is very obvious trigger for it. And it's those ads that are usually the most noticeable and usually the trigger seems to be around 12-18 hours before the ad is served up which often makes them very easy to identify but, in some cases, very hard to figure out how FB got it. And again, I can't say for sure how they are doing it but, having seen it over the course of many years now, I can safely say it goes beyond cookie tracking, as in just tracking my own cookies.

But yes, it is terrifying and it's funny because it's ones like this that stand out, ones where it feels like there is no way FB should have had that info and yet what I pretty much take as normal now is the everyday obvious tracking that FB do that they shouldn't do. Search for something on Twitter, just as one example, 24 hours later you might find a related ad popping up on FB. At what point is FB intercepting that information? I don't know but it doesn't seem like FB should have access to even that kind of tracking. However they are doing it, even their day to day normal tracking seems horribly invasive.