this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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What I want to know is why when I'm talking to my wife in the car about buying new shoes do I get a YouTube ad that evening about new shoes, when I never got that kind of ad before.
Are our phones listening to us while we talk in the car, and then ads are generated from that?
I'd really like to know the answer to that question.
Edit: fixed typo, shoes, not shows.
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It's usually not a case of the phone listening but, more creepily, that your behavior before and after talking to your wife about new shoes signaled that you want to buy new shoes.
Ad algorithms are surprisingly perceptive about signals that aren't obvious.
There was no previous or after behavior.
We were in a car, long road trip, I mentioned needing to buy new shows during the trip, and when I got home late that evening YouTube was serving me up ads for shoes on my PC. No searches was done before or after the trip (as I mentioned elsewhere, I just go to a store and buy multiple boxes of the same kind of sneakers/shoes on sale).
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It doesn't have to be your searches, it could have just been the fact that your phone recognized you were on a road trip and that people in your ad cohort tend to want to buy shoes while on road trips.
I've worked in algorithmic ad space before and I can say that I've never seen evidence of phones listening on conversations but I have seen plenty of evidence from years ago where all your other data is used to form a terrifyingly accurate profile.
We used to do dead reckoning and gps speed gait profiling and we would only need about a weeks worth of GPS data to know height, weight, sex, where you live, where you work, where your kids go to school etc.
We would take that data and cross reference that with data broker info to form a profile, put you in an ad cohort bin, and serve you up as a platform for ad matching services to match to ad campaigns, which get even further targeted.
Millions of dollars spent hyper targeting you but 99 times out of 100 the inaccurate campaign is paying more so they get the adspace but the one time the actual low paying hyper focused campaign gets through it's always scary how accurate it is.
tl;dr: Ad companies don't need to listen to your conversation to know what you want to buy, ads are usually inaccurate because the inaccurate campaign paid more
Are you f'ing kiddig me? You really going to go with that excuse? Somehow by driving from one city to another city on the freeway that tells Google that I want to buy shoes? Come on, that stretches credulity.
Also, sure is weird that that has never happened to me on any of the other times I also drove the same route over the years.
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