Is my bank purchase history shared with google somehow?
I guess it could just be coincidence?
Lots of ways this data flow could happen, at least in the US. Happy to go through specific details I have seen if you want to share more about this, but two high level points
1. Remember that when you purchase something, the data about the purchase is BOTH yours AND the entity from whom you made the purchase. Most of those entities have data sharing agreements of various kinds for all sorts of legitimate business reasons
2. It isn't google who knows about the purchase, and even the advertiser doesn't "know" you made a purchase. Advertising is zillions of two sided marketplaces, with an enormous ecosystem of data packagers and conveyers and linkers, with lots of concern about recency and freshness of data. Your purchase landed some key about you in a bucket that was mixed and repackaged with many other keys that the advertiser knows as "keys recently interested in Voltaren." Some of those keys are related to people who bought it, or who searched for it, or more indirectly who lingered while reading a page with an ad for it...and in most cases are very short lived. So give it a few weeks and many of those buckets of keys will have been completely remade.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...
Often, through the payment.
People use the same payment methods in the same stores over and over. This data is accumulated by the stores, and sold. if you signed up for a "points card" or some other gimmick to get 2¢ off something, the personal information you used when you signed up is added to the profile.
What you bought in the store is added to your profile (within legal limits in certain jurisdictions).
Some stores have devices that listen to your mobile phone's identifiers (wifi, Bluetooth, etc) and add that to your profile. Now the data profilers know what other stores you shop in. Some stores are experimenting with facial recognition (Walgreens). That gets added to your profile.
If you go to several in a single day, your route between the stores can be guessed. If you go to one or more places (stores, parking garages, streets that pass parking lots) that have sensors that read the NFC chips in your car's tires, then that can be added to your profile.
Now they know everywhere you go, everywhere you shop, everything you buy, how much you buy, how much you spend, your race, your gender, how you dress, what brands are displayed on your clothing, and any visible hair, moles, or tattoos.
That's just off the top of my head.
And people wonder, "Wow. I am a little scruffy. How did Facebook know to show me an ad for a razor?"
* visits to websites about that medication
* visits to websites talking about symptoms for which the medication helps
* searches for the above
* I would not be surprised if Google picks up interests from other accounts using the same WiFi (or even other devices on close proximity)
* there are some scary stories about Google/FB/Amazon listening to conversations
Other example, In the US, lots of jurisdictions have restrictions on ingredients. For example, dextromethorphan and pseudoephedrine.
If you are buying over the counter medicines that contain these, in some jurisdictions, you need to provide an ID.
This is wrong. Because in my case the information is highly personal, while in the shop owner's case it's just business information.
https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do
Second, disable GPS, and cellphone tower ID reporting (root needed.) So Google can't correlate you with sales records.
At the moment, there is no way to disable Google AGPS spying on the stock Android.
Third, block Google apps from reading your IMEI/IMSI/serial number, so they can't get AGPS data from your cellphone provider if it sells it.
Better, get a de-Googled ROM
This is like how you get a million ads about dishwashers the day after you Google around and buy one. At least wait for a short duration of time to let the target run out of medicine before adversiting new stuff.
Consider: one of the hardest parts about advertising is figuring out when someone is ready to buy the product. That is why car companies bombard ads everywhere, just to catch you in the rare moment when you may be buying a car. Lets guess that maybe the odds of a random person wanting to buy a dishwasher is 1 in a million.
Now consider someone who has just bought a dishwasher. What are the odds they need a new one or a second one? Maybe the one they bought is a few cm too tall/wide/deep. Maybe it came broken on arrival. What are the odds here? I have no data, but I would guess like 1 in ten thousand.
The odds of you buying a dishwasher and then needing to buy another are much better than the odds of someone wanting to buy a dishwasher in the first place, because the hard part is finding people who want to buy a dishwasher.
Also, completely unrelatedly, if you saw some armchair internet rando claim they'd debunked a major and long-standing business strategy of market sector leader, how seriously would you take them?
P(buying crap) < P(buying crap | has bought crap before)
Advertising is applied statistics and works on large cohorts. Nobody cares about you personally or your psychology.
Thus far, the clearest signal for answering the question "will I buy a mechanical keyboard in the next few days?" is "did I just buy mechanical keyboard?"
https://www.shopify.com/retail/examples-of-great-post-purcha...
... or not. Maybe their recommender systems have simply decided that buying product X is highly correlated with buying product Y where Y = X. Who knows? Probably not even google itself knows.
Also, remember that google is not trying to sell you anything, they're only trying to maximise adoption of their ad platform by advertisers. Who cares what you actually buy? Not Google.
Other comment explains it though: Many people return the dishwasher or screwdrivers (they might have ordered several) - Amazon wants to make sure you buy with them (though my account history should show that I practically never return things because I hate getting returned things as new).
For medicinal products I’d be keen to see research on whether a treatment group being re-targeted would report better efficiency of a treatment than a non-retargeted control.
Also, this person is now in a certain class of shopper (I think some this may be Experian Mosaic classes), so the advertiser knows what quality level of dishwasher this person is buying. The cheapest kitchen applicances, or premium kitchen applicances? Premium kitchen applicances on credit or premium kitchen applicances full price?
This will have a massive effect of choice of other items to advertize, the difference between ads for loans (credit purcahse) or ads for international holidays (full price purchase).
It throws dust into eyes of advertising efficiency measurement.
Company pays for ads, and Google just sizes the ad impressions to what it can find.
Why is this even a thing? Maybe I should just go back to buying everything with cash, it's impossible to keep up with all the crap we need to disable or hack around
I guess this is one of the things that just has to be forbidden by law.
And some agencies may be more interested in these exclusion databases. So I don't think there is any way to get out of this maze. When you sign up to exclude from a list, you get included in many other.
If you have the patience and knowledge, I can't recommend this enough. If you don't have the patience and the knowledge, this is a good way to end up with a non-functioning phone. (It will probably be recoverable, provided that you have the patience to acquire that knowledge and don't mind being without a phone in the meantime.)
When I say I can't recommend it enough, I mean it. I have been okay with simply disabling Google services for the past few years, yet Google seems to be embedding their services deeply in applications like Phone, Messages, Contacts, and Files. It is at the point where these applications would throw up a stream of notifications when Google services were disabled on Android 10. Even though they appeared to be usable, they are clearly trying to annoy people into re-enabling Google services.
https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal...
> Google’s third-party partnerships ... capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States
See also https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an... and https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no... - Google has deals with the credit card providers to get purchase data so they can link them back to your online behavior.
Geolocation is not very accurate from gps, so unless the store was off in a field by itself that’s not what happened here.
The only real way to avoid this happening would be to use a new credit card for each purchase, with a fake name/billing address.
I mean, if you have to try and double-guess your phone to make sure it's not spying on you the game is lost. I don't even know what game that is. But it's lost.
> U.S cardholders may opt out of Visa using their card transaction data for VAS, a suite of aggregated data products in the United States.
So while outside of US, I don't get the perks like cashabacks and no privacy either!
> We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
If you're using a store card, the merchant == the CC company and so knows everything about you anyways.
If you're not using the store card, the merchant probably has an agreement with the CC company to share the information, so the technical implementation is irrelevant.
Which means no push, breaking an absurd amount of apps.
Is there no way to get GPS location, without sending it to Google? As I understand, GPS positioning does not require the phone to send any data?
But it does "work". iPhone is the only phone besides a GrapheneOS phone with an intact security model worth writing about.
How many times have you opened up your laptop and not seen a Facebook add for something you just did, or something you discussed? You'll never notice those occasions.
Frankly, Facebook and their proxies always speak in meaningless nonsense about everything. If you asked Zuck if he ate kittens, you’d get some reply about facebooks mission and why cats are important.
For some mysterious reason, all explanations for the “Facebook is listening” phenomenon are uniquely cogent, clear and dismissive.
Personally, I have zero doubt that a downstream “partner”, data provider, or affiliate is processing audio data of questionable origin for ad insights. Call center companies with tight margins do it, why wouldn’t an ad company?
AdTech is frankly a revolting industry.
There's a moral hazard that incentivizes any company that can do so to bug user's homes for advertising purposes. IMO it should be illegal.
Ever since, about 1/3 of my instagram ads are for it. Never had an instagram ad for it before.
I would agree with you last decade. This decade, I have my doubts.
That, and I tend to go to bed between 21:00 and 22:00. But I don't attribute it to anything but me being in a position to look at the clock around that time, and I haven't wondered if I see it any more than 21:09 or 21:30. Would be an interesting histogram, if nothing else.
Adtech is creepy and dystopian.
When I finally overcame the shock, the very first thing I did was to ask her if she, or a guest, indeed searched for, or otherwise "input" anything related to usb-sticks or water-proofness into a computer system. The answer was no.
I don't know what to make of it. I don't want to succumb to conspiracy theories of the sort that ambient sound is recorded by our devices at all times. Most plausible explanation is perhaps the one about cognitive bias.
I say this not because I am especially skeptic or rational, I say this because a similar thing happened to me yet I know for a fact that it was a coincidence. It feels unbelievable yet 1/1000 events happen every now and then. All in all, if Facebook knew you were a technical person it’s not unlikely that an ad for a water proof usb stick would be relevant to you.
Suppose you were building this capability. Would you necessarily leave it on 100% of the time, and if someone started acting 'weird' around their phone ("hey, I'm sitting in a lab, and someone is just talking to me a lot") it might be a good time to turn off the capability.
Plenty of malware knows to turn itself off when someone has Wireshark installed (or a number of other "tells" that the malware can get that you might be running on a security researcher's machine). Even simply running microphone-based data gathering infrequently might be enough to confound a journalist or researcher with limited time budget.
Now otoh as far as I know, microphone usage is not cheap on mobile devices. So either these apps are doing sporadic on/off recording or we would see a strong impact on the phone charge life.
(don't recommend it of course)
we need better legislation. advertising is a cancer on the entire earth.
I would think something like this would be the most likely culprit.
One of the first things I noticed after moving to America was that I was being served ads for oddly specific in-store purchases. I checked my bank's terms and discovered that, sure enough, they were sharing my transaction history with "non-affiliates" so that they could market to me.
From memory, they did offer opt-out methods for limiting the amount of data that they shared. Maybe you could see if your bank offers the same?
I’ve actually worked at a company that was purchasing this data from banks, it was all anonymized and we were looking for trends. Maybe there are other companies that are able to buy the pii data and use it for marketing, but I think there are better, simpler sources. The stores/brands themselves can sell the data about their customers, or they are passing it to google to run targeted ads on their own customers and then google now has that data too and can use it for other things, etc.
It needs the credit card company, the payment processor, and the merchant to all have compatible systems that support it. I know I've seen it advertised as a feature of some business cards.
Here's an image: https://i.imgur.com/KqIN6oB.png
I'm about as impressed as I am mortified. I thought I had my opsec down, I was using noscript, I use throwaway email addy's where I suspect I'll be spammed.
But I was had too.
This Hecatoncheires entity is getting ever-larger. It knows a lot. It knows me well. I have seen evidence that it knows about the medication I take, the insecurities I have, my half-baked aspirations and plans. I feel defeated at times when I see its knowledge of me manifested in the ads I am shown, I feel confronted because at the time of this writing I don't know where this leak occurred, I don't know at what vector exactly I'm being had.
Also I guarantee I went directly to a website for a product, a vitamin, which I never searched for and purchased it and then received ads for the exact product and brand I purchased for the next week on Google searches and other Google ads and that was after they supposedly stopped personalizing ads. I don’t know if it was the credit card company, or Google analytics being installed on their website, or then just selling my data but it was obvious that someone was sharing my data and I wasn’t being told about it.
Lastly just last week I had been searching for a bed on Google, a very specific California king bed so that I could try to find the lowest price. Literally the day after I bought the bed, my girlfriend saw that exact model of bed appear on her Facebook ads. She had never searched for the bed or any bed but was browsing from the same IP address as me so I assume and that’s how they targeted her.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/variety.com/2017/digital/news/g...
Now how they know you bought X
1. Say CC sells data to say Bluekai (now salesforce). If you bought a hammer, they need not have known it was from HD, a middle man might simply be bidding for anyone categorized as shopping for home improvement goods and hoping to cash in on HD lead-gen/affiliate $$$
2. You likely searched online for these at some site and probably just don’t remember that you did.
The only thing that will get rid of this is to ban/regulate “affiliate” marketing (so shady companies who don’t follow rules can’t cash in), because so long as someone is willing to pay to bring sales, it will happen on way or another.
On my way I looked up directions in google maps, then for a week had dental insurance adds.
This one is obvious though.
That was on iOS with it’s pretty strict location tracking rules etc.
I’d be interested to see if you can get it to show you adds just by visiting the dentist (and not searching) on a vanilla android phone (IE google’s location history on by default)
The way it worked at [former employer] was, we had a lot of digital properties. Every digital property collected analytics on all visitors. All that analytics got post-processed and cross-referenced until we could form a "profile" on every visitor. Because you leave a teeny tiny trail of information everywhere you go, we cobble it all together until we know who you are on each site. The probability just gets higher as we collect more data. And we'd collect data from everywhere - e-mail marketing campaigns, ad traffic on partner sites, user profile data, web surfing habits, and buying access to privately maintained databases.
Even if everyone wore a mask and black clothes everywhere they went, surveillance cameras still capture height, gait, mannerisms. Watch long enough and you know "Gait #24434 mannerisms #593483 height #933 goes in/out of this residence at these specific times, goes to this supermarket, goes to this nail salon, sometimes goes to a house somebody else seems to live in".
Maybe it's multiple people with the same gait, mannerisms, height - but in the same neighborhood? In any case, it doesn't matter if they are all different people as long as they behave the same way; we market to them the same. Your entire life is just a string of digits in a marketing-recommender algorithm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion?wprov=sfti1
I no longer have a Android phone, but too frequently I would buy something offline and have the item follow me - including impulse buys and things that I definitely didn't look for online.
It happened with things I would talk about as well on occasion. I joked in front of my phone about visiting Greece, and a few minutes later auto-suggest in Google offered me "How much.. [is plane tickets to Greece]"
I know my devices are (probably) not listening, but I can't explain it either. Neither of us searched for the product or saw it online or anything, we just discussed something and got ads about it a few minutes to hours later.
It’s the core mechanic.
Even here in privacy conscious Germany the largest bonus card, payback Punkte, is simply giving you a 1% back just to get you to log your own purchase.
Why else would they do it? Because they like you?
(Local area code) 867-5309
There's always an account, and it's a 100% gamble if this purchase you get something.
> Is my bank purchase history shared with google somehow?
Google buys Mastercard (if not more) transactions and ties them to your Android location history.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...
There's something else going on here.
A group of friends were on a road trip, driving for several days cross-country. These are university-aged young males, 20-23. None have any interest in starting a family any time soon.
At the beginning of the trip, they agreed (verbally) to test if google was listening by discussing "nappies" intermittently, loudly and jokingly. They would only discuss nappies in person - everyone agreed not to mention this on any digital channel whatsoever, not to look up nappies for any reason, etc. That is, they deliberately excluded nappies from their online lives.
They chose nappies specifically because they're completely irrelevant. None had ever to their knowledge been delivered an ad for nappies. None had ever purchased nappies or any baby product.
Sure enough, end of the trip - ads for nappies.
I would love an explanation more plausible than their phones were listening.
One of the three deviated and searched for nappies online prior to the trip.
Rather than relying on external people to make judgement, you could test the hypothesis yourself: write on paper a phrase. Spend one week without ads and document all ads you see. Spend second week saying word N times per day. Also document all ads you see.
Ask N people to do this and report your findings, then you might provide statistical insight and validate your hypothesis.
Otherwise, who's to say one of those students didn't Google it before the trip?
Does anyone have any ways to improve the design of the above experiment?
They could also have looked up something relevant to nappies, stayed in a house (and used internet there) where the owners have a baby, etc.
Then when I was done, I closed all browser tabs, I unlocked my smartphone to check Instagram, and the second ads I get is a Gundam ad. I have no idea how my shadow "desktop" ad profile and shadow "mobile" ad profile matched. I share no accounts between my desktop and my smartphone :
- I use different Google accounts on my phone and desktop (although I occasionally log in one or the other in private tabs)
- The internet connections are different : 4G for phone, fiber for desktop
- On desktop, I use Chromium with Ad block Plus
- I do not use facebook nor instagram on my desktop PC
This must stop.
Also, it's plausible that one of your contacts has your phone number connected with the email of your desktop google account.
Visa has very strict rules about audience size, and all the audiences are modeled. (Your criteria can’t target something like less than 20k users, and then they model that up to a few million users).
In this case either the store, the pos/crm, or bank used his purchase data.
Most people, myself included, do so many searches so casually that we don’t remember doing it much of the time.
Source: FB Ads and IG ranking for 7 years.
What I'd like to know is if the same happens when I pay with Apple Card, or when I use Apple Play with, say, a VISA card?
Not necessarily. I’ve only seen a few huge merchants sending level 3 data:
https://paymentdepot.com/blog/level-3-data-processing/
Staples.com and airlines are the only ones where I can see the items bought on my credit card statement. Although it’s possible that some banks are not reporting that information on the statement, but I couldn’t find any more data on the subject, other than the fact that smaller businesses are not sending this information.
The ad copy is funny - Voltaren, not just for accelerated healing, or something to that extent. Everyone I know uses it (or, more likely, cheaper generics) for pain relief, without any particular expectation that the injury will heal faster. So that's the claim they hone in on, as opposed to the thing everybody knows. Standard ad stuff, I'm sure, but it's interesting when you notice it.
The players in the surveillance ecosystem have shaped themselves into narrow forms that allow for plausible deniability. App makers, device makers, the monetization SDK providers, the re-targeting platforms with their Orwellian forecasting & optimization calculations and especially the data brokers each play their part in a division of labor as powerful as Adam Smith's pin factory.
The pushback will come from the EU in my opinion. The U.S Big Tech file is going to be taken up with tackling the monopoly power of platforms for the next few years.
In the meantime beware of free apps on your phone and look up how to opt out of marketing on your smart TV. Pay for sensitive items with cash. If your phone is Android use the Firefox browser with the uBlock Origin plugin.
In my family’s case, my wife’s hospital admission and prescription was sufficient to correctly identify her as likely 10-12 weeks pregnant. Their confidence in that was sufficient to yield us a Fedex’d box containing congratulations and starter kits of enfamil, on her due date. Since they don’t read your records, just infer from events, they didn’t know that she had miscarried, and nearly died in the process.
I know this, because Enfamil identified the list used to target her, and I bought it for my zip code. I also learned that my neighbor 4 doors down has type 2 diabetes, and has expressed interest in a BMW or Audi at the end of her then-current lease. (She went Audi btw)
When people lecture you about various observational biases, you’re being paranoid, etc, they are full of shit. The marketing machine is way more wired up into everyday life than you can imagine.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...
It is deeply invasive and should be blocked.
It works like this. You go to a store and buy, say, a sexual wellness product. You then get targeted with ads online (search result ads, facebook ads, news media ads, amazon sponsored results etc) for the same product, or something related (let's say something embarrassing that you might not want other people to see). Other users on your same network or IP may also be re-targeted with the same ads.
Credit card data tracking is a levelling up of surveillance capitalism. It is deeply intrusive. Not all card providers participate, but it is a significant source of revenue for them [1]
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90490923/credit-card-companies-a...
[Edit: Removed specific reference to a medication as it likely triggered anti-spam]
The majority of targeted advertising I see is for items I just bought. There’s also a reasonable explanation for this...
Not every merchant shares purchase data, so if you do any research anywhere before making a purchase, they know you are interested, but as there was no tracking beacon on the site you ultimately bought from (or the purchase was misidentified or delayed or any number of reasons), that’s why you are now seeing targeted ads for it.
At this stage I’m just assuming it’s a coincidence.
It has made me realize the holy grail for google and advertisers is to access your bank transactions and advertise to you based on that.
It's possible they match using location but they might have other data that increases the matching like payment provider which has a lot of your personal data as well as knows your purchased something from that store at that time.
OP probably googled something related before going out to buy the item :)
Many cases of this are just clustering.
Another option would be if they're integrating something like Close-Up data.
Close-Up is a company that collects prescription data and sells it to different marketing companies. They usually collect what doctors prescribe, so they can tell if pharma marketing efforts are working. I'm not sure how deeply entrenched they are in the US (or how HIPPA compliant they are).
The eerie feeling compounded by the fact that we are sometimes correctly targeted and there's no way to distinguish the two. Zeynep Tufekci writes a lot about the this type of thing if you're interested in it.
Is it surprising that ads are targeted at someone who actually bought the product? Doesn’t this show that ad targeting works? You just happened to notice the ads after you made the purchase.
What products did you buy that you didn’t see ads for? Which ads did you see that you didn’t end up buying the product?
This is a case of you being aware of Voltaren because you bought it, saw the ads, and are now trying to connect the two.
There were two explanations:
- they are stealing my thoughts with 5G.
- random things are random and I don't remember 99% of the ads where I couldn't correlate them to other events.
(yes, there's a middle ground somewhere that they know the subjects that I'm interested in and sometimes someone throws a bullseye)
Its common and help companies target clients with ads on the internet in general (YouTube, sites, etc).
It works like that:
- The Chemist wants to sell things online or physically.
- They pay google for ads for their products on sites related to its business lines or keywords about its niche.
Google then show their ads for people in general, people interested on those subjects or to people visiting sites about those subjects.
Interest is determined by search history and navigation (every google ad in a site (chemist or not) help google know you were there).
Then the chemist want to target past customers with more specific ads (like reminding people of items in theirs carts):
- They send google ads information about clients and past physical or online purchases / interactions.
Google then match the user with its own database and connect the sent data with its own data.
- Now the Chemist benefits from the google (because google can find you online)
- Now other google clients benefit from this data (because now your google hidden profile is more accurate about your interests and habits)
- Now Google benefits from that because it can use the purchase data to hone its models about ad-to-spend.
The chemist also want to pay google a fraction of the purchases if the client saw an ad.
- Google uses information sent in realtime by the Chemist and other companies, model this data and determine which people, sites and subjects have a bigger probability to turn an Ad into a sell.
I have myself done that in the past and Facebook was quite accurate at turning ads into course subscriptions.
Walmart is rolling out facial recognition across all their stores. Doesn’t matter if you pay cash. Pay with a card once and you’re identified.
I consulted for Axciom and the best way to avoid their reach is to move to a country with good privacy laws or to a country that’s too poor for these big companies to care about.
I had such a coincidence happen to me once. I saw an ad for a product I've never heard about online... and a short while later, I saw the same ad on non-smart broadcast TV, billboard, in print or some similar place where I could be sure that the ad was not targeted. Had it happened the other way around, I would have doubted it myself, but it was clear that this could not have been anything but coincidence.
Besides that, why would the company behind it spend money on promoting the very product that you already bought? If anything, the fact that you bought it would be used to not show you ads, at least until some time later when you'd be likely to buy another one. (Retargeting frequently gets this wrong because they see the interest but don't get the purchase information.)
I left my (locked) iPhone 6 in front of a TV overnight, that was left on a Spanish channel.
The next day, ALL of my Facebook ads, across all devices, were in Spanish — along with about 20% of the ads that I came across during regular web browsing. Took about a month for them to revert back to English.
I do not speak Spanish. At the time, I lived in a rural New England area, where census data reported very low Hispanic population. Zero reason for me to get targeted with alternative language advertisements.
I’m not a Luddite of any kind. Several decades of tech industry experience, specifically with ecommerce software engineering. Hold all available certifications for Google marketing, Facebook marketing, Hubspot marketing, along with many more. Know quite a bit more about this topic than the average Joe, and it concerns the hell out of me.
Since that day, Facebook’s apps haven’t been allowed on any of my devices, and their services only get used by me for work purposes.
If you bought Voltaren as a joke though an offline random process ( which is hard to do ) then you might have more evidence it's linked to the sale part.
The other day I watched Mosquito Coast again after 30 years. Afterwards I saw Apple are making a TV series. That's not a coincidence I just have no idea how it happened. It was not simple, a Ad or Article I would have read, it's an interesting premise I always remembered. It was downloaded from the torrents. It was after looking at a movie then director then actor then movies then the decision to watch. But something I don't know what, helped me stop there on the chain of browsing and watch it.
Initial Bayesian Conclusion Histogram:
- 33% Voltaren ad push just happens to be underway, and no spying was used
- 33% Google's Android Chrome knew I visited a HN link to today's post about Voltaren, somehow added this fact into my advertising profile, Android Twitter app used it to pick me an ad
- 33% like above, except that since in Android Chrome I'm logged into Twitter, somehow Twitter itself was the upstream source of the interest hint
https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/help/1150627594978290
Wouldn’t be surprised if this data is used to refine which ad these platforms should show you.
Then they can put on their curriculum vitae that they worked as a "Googler" even though they added nothing to society (except confusion and paranoia).
Google may even allocate tax write offs because they "filled a seat" among their ranks.
I'm in Australia, and find when I pay by credit card, this same thing happens to me where I get ads for medicines related to precription medicine I've just purchased.
When I use cash however, I don't get the ads, so my best bet is that it's the credit card that's used to match the purchase to me in this scenario.
[1] http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
Discussed on HN earlier:
Look for activity related to Voltaren (it has a search function)
I did bring my Android phone that has got Messenger lite installed, but that's stretching it tbh.
Google is an ad company, they sell your profile/interests and such to advertisers, it's their core business. So it's not "stretching" at all...
You can opt out of it, or simply signup for a rewards card and not use your real info.
"I wonder if I should buy X" but I dont actually want X and never search for it. That alone makes google ads start showing me ads about X.
If you want to avoid being tracked, use cash.
Google analyzes receipts. When I still used gmail, it would automatically add flights to my calendar based exclusively on the receipt sent to my gmail account.
Usually you make a 5-10 year purchase, like a TV or a large kitchen appliance, and they keep showing you ads for the exact same model.
Did you email anyone about it or receive any emails about it?
If so...
Your perception works in 2 modes - bottom-up (signal processing) - and the ad didn't make it through - and top-down (pattern recognition) - exactly the experience you report - you recognise a recent pattern.
Could it be? of the billions of items you could be advertised for, why then exactly Voltaren?
Do you have an android phone, by chance?
2. You are using a credit card and expecting not to be identified.
Everything else is details.
Have you ever noticed how you don't seem to see much of X, and then all of a sudden you see one X. And then you can't stop seeing X.
Though, googles probably spying on you.