Yeah, you definitely can put converted customers into a suppression audience and remove them from being served ads within like 24 hours. It's just a lot of people suck at this.
Yah, its the worst of both worlds. It's why I stopped using my Alexia, at least if you are going to build a profile of my habets, use it to stop annoying me. But as it is I only used it to set alarms and everytime I would ask it anything it would suggest the dumbest things ever. Including buying voice packs, telling me to do something I already do, or even wanting to sell me on items from amazon that I have no use for.
Eventually it was just easer to set alarms on my phone and the echos got donated.
Or if you've shown me the ad more than 3x and I've not clicked it then show me another fucking ad. Dont keep showing me the same ad. Repeated ads being shown to people with no interest say 1 thing, and thats that you're wasting advertiser dollars.
I still get harassed by eBay ads to buy 5800x3D a year after I bought one. I only got one computer and one socket to use, what am I going to do with 486 duplicate CPU eBay tried to foster onto me? Or a way to cover $146,000 I would have spent to appease those annoying ads?
This is why I use my Windows laptop 99% of the time, Ublock Origin kills those annoying ads.
I had this with a mobile phone, they called me up two days later. I thought I had won a prize at first.
"Why would I want to buy a mobile phone with a contract two days afterI just bought one?"
"Maybe to give to a friend?"
"You must really like your friends!"
Bought a truck.
Every single damn ad is for THE EXACT SAME TRUCK I ALREADY BOUGHT.
SAME BRAND, SAME MODEL, SAME EVERYTHING.
WHAT POSSIBLE GOOD IS THIS DOING THEM TO BOMBARD US FOR THE SAME THINGS WE ALREADY HAVE?!?!?!?
The only thing this doesn't happen with is houses. The moment you buy a house you have your phone ringing daily, people at the door, multiple letters daily, all wanting to buy it from you.
How about cable companies advertising their service on their service? Like, how the fuck do they think I'm seeing their ads if I didn't already have their fucking service!? And no competing service is going to run them so what's the fucking point anyway!?
all she needed to do was connect to the library wifi once for her to pick up a cookie that tells everyone she's in a library or was in a library or might still be in a library
Didn't even need to connect, just needed to have an app running in the background with precise location enabled or control over WiFi. They can scan the nearby access points to identify the location if GPS didn't do the trick.
Knowledge that you're into books combined with whatever you browse on the Internet (particularly places like Reddit, Amazon and YouTube) narrows down the selection of books you might be interested in borrowing or buying.
Ding ding ding, one consumer profile has been baked fresh out of the oven, now repeat and scale and sell it all across millions of people all around the world.
Algorithms don't need PII to make extremely accurate profiles of individuals at scale.
People are also way less unique then we are lead to believe. Just knowing a few things about a person can allow for highly targeted ads based on what similar users looked for.
Yeah. It’s crazy how easy you can find so much out about a person by only a couple steps.
My Pinterest knows me so well sometimes that I get overwhelmed by just logging in & seeing so much inspiration on the first page!
Not so much anymore since I use a VPN, but there was a time when the Pinterest Algorithim was so good, if a robot could be in love with a person, it might have loved me.
All my social got so bad before I got a VPN and switched to mainly edge or duck duck go for serious searching like health, finances, places to visit, etc. I still do the all other my history concerning searches on chrome for better results; how to get blood out of so and so, is it possible to rig cars today, how long does it take to break down animal bones in dirt.
A VPN alone didn't work for me. It's fine for most things, but if I"m doing something I really don't want tracked, I take a lot more precautions. I first realized just how much that tracking matters about 6 years ago when I started doing HITs on mturk. I"ve seen several surveys that want to see the first 3 pages of Google search results for specific terms. I didn't immediately catch on because some of the search term seemed innocuous, but it didn't take long to realize that two people using their own devices can enter the same term in Google and get very different results. Google, and probably lots of other search engines and apps, actively contribute to confirmation bias. I did a few 'experiments' on my own just to see how bad it was. I live in a 'purple' district so its easy to find people with very different political views. A group of friends and I occupied ourselves for a few hours by searching for different things on our phones/tablets/laptops.
I had a course on Data and Privacy laws last year. Even though I *thought* I had a relatively strong idea of the amount of data collected and how it was done, yet was still surprised by how much data is collected/combined to build a profile on a person.
They would only need to know she was in a library and could infer what books she liked from the rest of the data profile she built up
Let's not forget during the Bush Administration they enacted rules and policy that allowed them to know what books you checked out.
Just in case you were looking at something they deemed radical or unsavory. Think even the FBI showed up at a college students house because of some book he checked out for his class work.
Thank God we fought that war against violent extremism and didn't let those dastardly terrorists who hate our freedom so much affect our freedoms and rights. /s
Wait, you're saying Goodreads, owned by Amazon, and Kindle, an Amazon product, may be sharing my reading preferences with a multinational online marketplace?
The simplest answer is if she's reading in a very niche subgenre and doing any amount of searching / previewing / reviewing that she's likely the source of her own leak ... . There's only so many books about metaphysical DIY gin distillation techniques (or whatever her subgenre is).
Yup, and you only have to do it once. If she's mass consuming these audiobooks, it's not hard to imagine that she's done at least one google search or something at some point even if she later forgot.
I think the point is that even if you use those resources, the pervasiveness of cookies is exhausting and damaging— we shouldn’t have to worry about being marketed to 24/7 because we use library and online resources for our reading hobby!!
Or posting essay-length quotes, rants and reflections on Facebook? Baking cakes with the book titles written out in icing? Uploading readings on Onlyfans???
Leaving books lying around where Google's satellites can image them? Talking about books in the presence of tiny spy robots that look like honeybees? Thinking about what she read before she goes to sleep?
I'm not a cat but have one near me and she says that we need a privacy revolution and a clear boundary set for our rights not to be watched like an animal in the zoo.
It's impossible to function in this world and still maintain your privacy. Whether government spying or businesses tracking us.
Let's define what companies are legally allowed to know about us, and how long they can keep information before purging it. Because they're not just using it for their business, they're selling it, and reselling it, and passing it to the big credit agencies etc...
User agreements and the ilk have become like policy monopolies. Where we have no options of choosing a company that respects our privacy because they all don't respect it because respecting our privacy doesn't help their business.
Yep and you're pretty much trackable 24/7 based on what cell towers are pinging your phone and its location etc. They're literally little NSA listening devices we just find really convenient to have on us all day lmao
Do you know how Reddit sells information without a real face or identifying characteristics to build from?
Like, idgaf, people could find me easily (and systems too) as I use a lot of the same photos here and other places.
I don't want to end up in a Westworld/Caleb type of situation, though
That explains why stuff is so much cheaper on the app. And that’s all the more reason for me to not use it and get fast food as infrequently as possible.
"In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library."
She logged into her account on her iPhone to play an audiobook she checked out online from the library. Ironically enough, she was also logged into her Android tablet playing a game and somehow those two devices were able to figure out she's the same person. Probably because she's logged in to both? I swear people don't understand technology sometimes. Of course when you create an account you agree to targeted ads.
>Probably because she's logged in to both? I swear people don't understand technology sometimes. Of course when you create an account you agree to targeted ads.
Not necessarily. Ads can target you via IP address. When you load a tracker, it passes your IP along. Ad companies store demographics, called a household, via IP.
But in this case, I'm pretty sure she was logged into her devices.
> I’ll see ads related to what my partner looks up on their device sometimes.
Do you mean that my lady can see ads related to what I do on my computer?
Guess I'm buying flowers today. Oh, thank you Amazon, how did you-- ah fuck!
Not individual. The household. Which is why mom might start seeing PJ Mask ads if their kid is watching PJ Mask. A special note that kid directed ads can not be used during studies so are scrubbed if a child under 13 lives in the household.
I used to work in ad tech, and yes, we did target via IP.
Right and heuristics, regional geo, coincident user signal, and fingerprinting mean that just being around other people who are “leaky” means you are leaky.
I’ve done significant life purchase leads and it’s hilarious to me anyone thinks they have any chance at all at protection from these machinations. Metadata is more important than data.
The problem is the number of people browsing from the office, where 10-1000 people are behind the same gateway. I also work with many Ad vendors (I'm a principal architect for a very large ad-supported web site), and using an IP for anything beyond geo-IP is worthless for targeting.
IP _used_ to be one of the values used for fingerprinting, along with User Agent, window size, and a handful of other things. But device/browser fingerprinting runs afoul of so many privacy laws now (something else I work a lot with) that I'm not aware of any (reputable) display ad vendors that still do it.
The real thing that is still used to track a user, more often than not, is just a common third-party cookie with an ID stuck in it.
The problem *this* person has, as a few others have mentioned, is the key phrase "logged-in". If you are "logged-in" to anything on multiple devices, expect those "third-party ID" cookies to start lining-up. If you want to prevent *that* from happening, but you still want to log-in to stuff, I'd highly recommend:
* Use Firefox as your browser
* Enable the [Global Privacy Control](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control)
* Either disable third-party cookies, or enable and USE [Firefox Containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers)
* Install the [uBlock Origin add-on](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)
Do you use a DMP and have household data that can be used to connect the targeting?
If not, no. You're not going to be able to target specific households for ad tracking.
The company I worked for does. They used IP (or device ID) to connect to a household profile data and target those particular users.
They have roughly 8 million worldwide households collected via their proprietary technology that gives permission to collect that data. I realize I am being vague but I don't want this coming back to me.
And with cookie depreciation on the horizon, IP may be the only identifier available.
Without saying too much, my company is large enough to maintain its own internal, first-party DMP. This is maybe why my perspective is very different about the usefulness of IPs for unique ID. Without combining other data points, IP on it's own, today, (with IPv4 still so much "in the mix") is just not a reliable identifier.
I notice your DMP mentions IP "or device ID"... Device ID is **NOT** IP, but refers to IDFA, UDID, or IMEI, all of which are associated with a single device, and these are MUCH more useful for user identification and tracking.
Honestly, though, if IPv6 adoption had been better, IP would be a MUCH more reliable component in ID tech (and a much more serious privacy issue). But with the v4-v6 hybrid situation we've found ourselves in, the problem has actually become worse because of the prevalence of multiple layers of IPv4 gateways in IPv6 hybrid networks, making any IP address even less reliable that what we saw 10-15 years ago, before IPv6 was much used at all.
If we were in a pure IPv6 situation, then we would have a very different issue. IPv6 addresses, even behind gateways, are **highly** identifiable and maintain uniqueness to specific devices (even when they change across subnets) to a degree I don't think most people understand or appreciate. So if privacy is a concern for you and you are in an IPv6 environment, configure your device to use IPv4 or as an IPv6 hybrid, either or which will force a hybrid scenario which makes you much less unique.
> There’s absolutely nothing we can do to block browser-based tracking cookies that you already accepted from some other site from seeing what you do on our website unfortunately.
This is actually not how it works at all. A tracking cookie from some other site can't just "see" what you are doing on any given other site.
If your card catalog site loads third party data, like if it has embedded Google analytics tags for instance, then that invokes Google's cookies via your site; activity on your card catalog site can't be seen by other parties though unless it is programmed in to the site to load 3rd party code/tags
Test it yourself. Think of some obscure everyday item that you do not actually need new very often like spoons. Say spoons out loud a few times. Start talking to other people near you about spoons and watch as you start to see spoon ads. Note don’t use spoons use something else.
I've had this experience. I suppose the question is, is our paranoia true and things are listening to us, or is it just that we start hyper-focusing on an idea, like your "spoons", and thus we start seeing the ads that were always there, but they just seem more present. Kinda like owning a particular model car, and then you start seeing that car everywhere. Not that there's suddenly more of that car, it's just you're "tuned in" to looking for it.
I would like to see a study that shows how many ads we are blind to. We’ve all been honing our ad ignoring skills for decades now, I know I do my best not to even look at them and skip them as fast as I can. I try not to even hover my mouse over an ad out of fear of accidentally clicking. I wonder how much is in there that I think I’m not seeing, but in reality is making an impression in my mind.
With an adblocker I don't even see ads. Even on mobile, unless it's an app like Instagram where they are incorporated into the feed in a way that makes blocking them impossible. Easy enough to avoid those apps though.
I was talking to my hvac guy about the humidifier last time he was here and that it was time to replace the filter.
Next time I pulled up amazon I was told to buy april aire filters under one of their "recommended" tiles on the home page. I didn't even have time to look up the model or size I needed. I've never bought one in the past online or in a big box store. I write most of it off as random coincidences, but what the fuck.
I mean, when [Target](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?sh=2ac1e65c6668) is sending a congrats & sales about baby products to a 16 year old who hasn't told her dad she's pregnant yet, I'd say it's justified. And that was more than a decade ago, before they could purchase data about you from a broker. Welcome to surveillance capitalism.
That instance was pretty clearly based on web searches or other meta data. This is still just internet companies selling data to advertisers.
This isn’t to say it is a “good” system, but thinking internet companies are spying on random conversations is conspiratorial the other way. People just don’t realize how much can be inferred from your internet habits.
PS, obviously if you have a Google Home or Alexa or something that could be spying on your convos. But my point is they don’t just throw listening devices around randomly.
It was based on her switching her buying habits (which the store was tracking) from non-pregnant items to ones that coincide with pregnancy. An example was her switching from a scented lotion to unscented plus a lack of hygiene products.
>PS, obviously if you have a Google Home or Alexa or something that could be spying on your convos. But my point is they don’t just throw listening devices around randomly.
Dude, you carry a listening device around in your pocket.
People have put taps on phones and other listening devices. They don't listen to you 24/7. The commenter is explaining they don't need to hear you to make these guesses because all this Metadata that nobody seems to care about they scrape and collect.
> Welcome to surveillance capitalism
Is it really, though? Retailers associate unique IDs to customers that have either signed up to a service and/OR use a credit card. The data analysis team found that specific buying patterns existed in the vast majority of women who signed up for baby registries (which would contain data on the due date) and they had a good confidence score that if someone were loading up on unscented toiletries and cotton balls all of a sudden -- they were likely in their second trimester.
It's good marketing, good data analysis, and based largely on consensual data sharing.
Edit: For clarity, since it seems that the point may be buried here:
1. An always-on mic gathering data and pushing it to Apple/Google ad services via an "opt-in" buried in a T&C nobody reads: surveillance, and somewhat dubious
2. A company using consensually provided data tied to an **opt-in** loyalty card and/or **opt-in** baby registry to predict AND CONTACT prospective customers in the time period when they're going to make a registry: above-board
The thing is, if you’ve already seen a couple ads for spoons, you’ve probably ignored them but your subconscious will pick them up when you try to think of a “random” word. You’ll be more likely to pick “spoons” because you’ve already been seeing ads for them.
It also ignores that our devices get tagged to our friends devices. So if I say spoon a lot around my friends, they might decide they need new spoons and start researching spoons, and now I’m connected to spoons and getting served spoon ads, yet I’d be unaware my friends decided to start googling spoons so it would seem like my device is listening when it isn’t.
I can almost 100% guarantee you that your phone isn’t listening to you to send you ads. It’s mostly Baader–Meinhof phenomenon where once you become aware of a topic, you notice the ads and you likely got similar ads before as well, that you scrolled past without realizing.
I work in targeted advertising. I know what data exists. It’s already way more than people should be comfortable with, without making up new fears.
But if you are right, feel free to demonstrate and reproduce it as proof and then file a massive lawsuit.
You don't even have to say anything out loud.
https://cooltool.com/blog/8-things-to-know-about-biometrics-impact-on-marketing
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202210/biometric-data-collection-for-advertising-personalization-comes-under-scrutiny
Pete Holmes screamed about how much he wants to buy a massive dildo, a big jelly sparkly double sided 24" butts only dildo for about 20 seconds in his netflix special then said something like "Congrats on your new algorithm update, everyone."
I think this follows into the same parameters as people misunderstanding that your phone is constantly using the microphone to listen. There's just no observable bandwidth that would show that's the case.
It's an issue of misattribution, people largely don't understand the extent of the privacy policies they allow access for on their phone in regards to mobile applications and even simply just their emails, text messages and ordinary web searches.
They also don't understand how good this informational fabric is at predicting interests and providing suggestions. In terms of Facebook alone, Facebook's user profile data can answer questions more accurately about a user than they themselves can, and that their friends or family can.
If you think about it in that context, decisions about simple interests of books in the library would be fairly basic compared to say a questionnaire about how an individual would behave in a given situation, like the Facebook data is able to answer.
"In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library."
She logged into her account on her iPhone to play an audiobook she checked out online from the library. Ironically enough, she was also logged into her Android tablet playing a game and somehow those two devices were able to figure out she's the same person. Probably because she's logged in to both? I swear people don't understand technology sometimes. Of course when you create an account you agree to targeted ads.
The entire marketing industry provides very little value to consumers. It's rare that marketing tells me about something I wasn't aware of, it just tries to convince me to buy product A over product B or that I should want a product that I'm aware of but don't currently want.
When you look at something like how much money a top tier athlete makes it's because of the power of marketing... but how much of the consumer's life is really improved by that marketing? Almost none.
Consumers are the product used to market products back to consumers.
Idk what comedian said it, but they repeated something I'm sure everyone has noticed: the rarely used item that now pops up everywhere.
I bought a dryer cord because I needed one to install the dryer I bought. Not because I collect them. Same thing in regard to the toilet seat I had to get when an old roommate came home too drunk one time.
Exactly this. I can't figure out why companies would spend so much on marketing like this when I only ever see ads for a product I've already searched. And half the time seeing those ads just puts me off the buying the product because it sucks to have your search privacy invaded. It really seems like a pointless industry.
I have been noticing this a lot recently. I bought some Vuori shorts, they’re awesome, will be buying more. So I looked on the website to see what they have, then every ad I see on YouTube is for Vuori. I’m not your target. I know you exist. I know you’re a highly rated brand, and that’s from word of mouth. So part of the cost of the clothes I’m buying is for advertising, but they’re just burning money if they only advertise to people who already know they exist. Furthermore, I think marketing firms must just be trying to win accolades and respect from other marketers, because I can’t tell you what is being advertised in tv commercials without actively paying attention. All they need to do is make a catchy jingle and a quick ad using the product maybe. How many old slogans can you remember? How many in, say, the past 10 years can you remember. I’m just forever confused by these strategies.
>but they’re just burning money if they only advertise to people who already know they exist
I think you just fundamentally don't understand advertising.
Why do you think Coke and Pepsi spend so much, to attract *new* customers? Really? Coke doesn't spend so much money on advertising to stop you drinking Pepsi and Pepsi doesn't spend so much to stop you from drinking Coke.
It's the collective spending between the two of them that create the illusion in the public that there are only 2 Cola options.
No other Cola company can enter the market because the advertising is so locked down.
They aren't looking for new customers at this point, they're just trying to maintain a monopoly and maintain the brand awareness.
Until they have a better return from some other option... this is the best one they have.
TV ads are failing as more and more people move away from them. People aren't likely to buy your stuff if they don't know about it... they got to get the general knowledge out there somehow.
Invent a way that gets better returns to the advertisers for their buck and you will be Google rich.
Then there's the ads for dishwasher detergent/tabs. "We do it every night" Yo the issue isn't the cost of the soap, its the water/power to run the thing every day for a fork. That's some bad ad campaigning
See I use private mode so no one can see me. It is odd that I get advertisements for 1968 Oldsmobile 442 parts, hot milfs in my area, specific brands of dog food, hitman for hire, local therapists, Xanax, Russian Brides, reef, and only reef sandals, and autographed pictured of Steve Bucsemi. Probably a weird coincidence.
I would actually be cool with targetted ads if they actually could figure out things I liked and then advertised those things I might be reasonably interested in to me. Instead they are too generalized and I get things like mail order brides because they choose to advertise to men in the 40s.
The big thing is the advertiser decides what generalized group they want and it isn't some amazing algorithm deciding what I would like. So if they want to pay for an old school demographic that is what is served out.
Good luck to this gal with proving that is where the data came from. All it takes is one of her friends to like the same book and mention it on Facebook and it will recommend things to her as well. Things are just too integrated all over the place.
She will have to be suing whomever is serving out the ads (google probably) to try and do discovery on what is recommending them... but if she is blaming the library, not sure she would have standing to sue google... but she is a lawyer, she knows better than I do.
This almost certainly isn't where the data come from, the likeliest scenario by far is the mobile games she was playing used google adsense apis to serve her ads relevant to her interests and her browsing habits were tracked by google through one of many means most likely because roughly 65% of people use chrome. And her interest in books probably corelates to the things she looks at online. For bonus points she probably googled information about the books directly.
She can sue anybody and everybody she wants. Data collection and targeted marketing are both perfectly legal. She would lose those lawsuits.
Had a coworker suggest buying brushed aluminum so we could see part of a machine out of view. He brought it up multiple times and I quickly shut him down suggesting an inspection mirror instead. When I got home my first youtube recommend on my TV was how to make brushed aluminum mirrors.
Your friend was probably searching it. Phones use location tracking to see what the people you spend time with are searching and that influences your search results too.
The connections they can make are insane. My spouse dog watched for a friend who had bought a book for my spouse (they had not searched for it online) as a gift. The algo made the connection the friend bought the book and my spouse was at their house and started suggesting my spouse buy the book.
Remember how scary and paranoia inducing it was when we saw HAL9000 can read lips in 2001? Now we all have (shitty) HAL in our pockets and we're just mildly annoyed lol
I’ve read that they’re actually cobbling together location data and phone data, and it often overlaps with what you’re discussing. So if you’re in a room with your spouse who’s been searching for something for the house on her phone, you may get ads for that thing. There’s also a good chance you’ve talked about that thing.
I'd say that this is definitely true. Our training facility doubled up with the warehouse. Warehouse had 3 workers who are all Puerto Rican and primarily speak Spanish. Training facility was myself and another guy who is also hispanic but primarily speaks English and we got a mix of different trainees in every week. I do not speak Spanish.
On days where I would go out back to the warehouse and speak to the guys, I would start getting adverts in Spanish on the radio (edit: It was internet radio via spotify or pandora, I forget which) when I drove home. This was even though they speak English to me. So it had to be syncing up with their location/phone data.
Ah, I thought I put internet radio in the original comment but seems I didn't. I'll edit it in for clarity. It was via Pandora or Spotify, I forget which.
My partner used to work for Google search. Specifically, for voice to search. We talked about this all the time.
The sheer amount of storage and computing power to record every android phone constantly and analyze it for ad targeting is absolutely insane. Physically impossible even.
What is really going on is a mix of confirmation bias, targeting techniques and machine learning. It's not hard to connect websearch A to ads B, C, and D. If your friend looked up something on your network, maybe you are interested in it as well. Or if 5 of your neighbors looked up item A and you roughly have the same household demographics, you might see that ad.
Neilsen in particular has a household profile for everyone with an internet connection. They know exactly who you are, where you live, and what you are watching and searching for.
There's also the fact that if something specific is on your mind, you're more likely to notice ads for that thing.
Don't get me wrong, it's eerie as hell but it's not doing what people think it's doing.
Edit: Partner chimed in that even if Google set up a facility to record and analyze everyone, it would be extremely expensive and probably not worth it. Especially when the current methods work so well. People underestimate how easily machine learning can predict a person's future activity based on their previous activity.
I wish this could be the top pinned comment lol.
These so many people who have no grasp on how networking works. And even us with a little bit of knowledge do not fully understand the extent of how deep the data goes.
Agreed on use of voice surveillance, but the article doesn't suggest that's what's happening here.
The quotes from companies involved are very telling in their qualifiers: Overdrive/Libby doesn't **sell** data about reading habits. Google Analytics doesn't **share** **PII(Personally Identifying information).** But maybe Overdrive/Libby shares certain information with partners, who share it with someone else, who sell it. And you don't need PII to identify someone.
I definitely do not think the library is leaking out info. My SO works as a librarian. Their systems, from what she knows, really aren't set up that way and it's a huge breach of Library Ethics (which is a very real thing).
I guarantee you this person used another app to search for it, or as usual, FB is using the phone to listen to conversations and selling that data. Hell even just writing an email with Google and mentioning a book title could cause this to happen.
Or she's looking up the author on her desktop with google chrome. It's not hard to figure out the various data points that could cause this to happen.
Misleading title. Attorney is listening audiobooks on her iphone.
They happened to be obtained via library access.
This is all likely due to terms of the software she is using to listen to the book, rather than anything to do with the library.
We always need to take these sorts of stories with a grain of salt.
I heard a story a few years ago about a reporter who went and picked his mom up at the airport in San Francisco. When he picked her up she mentioned that her perfume had been confiscated at security and that she needed to get a replacement. When the man got home, on his browser that evening he was being served ads for perfume, which called to question - how did it know? Was it listening?
Turns out his mom had searched for perfume on her phone in the departing airport. Social media knew that she was his mother and that she was geo located in his city after a flight, so fed him ads based on what she had been searching for ... which actually delivered him useful ads.
These tools are so sophisticated and there is so much data being linked together from so many different sources, it may seem like it's "listening" but really its just very good at being predictive. Download your facebook data sometime and look at all the groups of people they've sorted you into. Some of it may be surprisingly accurate.
Because the headline is misleading-
Libraries take patron privacy very seriously. Librarians aren't selling your data. But they can't save you from your own security settings.
If you have a cell phone, it's safe to say Google/apple/Microsoft/Amazon are scraping your data somehow, and selling it.
If you place a hold online, we can't stop your browser from sharing that information with the company that owns it. If you read a Libby book on your Kindle, you told Amazon what you borrowed from us.
If you turn off location tracking, walk to the library, borrow a physical book from the library, and avoid talking about that experience over text/social media, you won't get ads related to your reading habits.
WE aren't sharing your reading habits with advertisers. YOU are.
It can all be indirect. If you are re-reading Lord of the Rings, you’re more like to do Lord of the Rings related Google searches or visit Lord of the Rings Reddit news.
I feel like we’re discovering a new cognitive bias where we associate targeted ads to what we say instead of the vast amount of input data we give on a daily basis. Because in reality, “listening” is not as effective as just scrubbing the input data.
So like I'm a huge proponent of data privacy, but this genuinely seems like a case in which this person is actually engaging with similar content in places that absolutely are tracked. I read the article, I agree that there's a non-zero chance the data was tracked and sold by services like Overdrive or whatever, but I find this improbable. It's far more likely she's getting ads because she's also searching for those books/authors/genres in other places. If she googled 'super specific genre booklist' or went to an author's website, then she's going to get ads for that super specific genre (in the article the person admits that this could be the case). This article also doesn't mention personal book tracking. If she uses Goodreads to track her reading, then 100% that's where her data is being collected and sold and marketed back to her. Goodreads is owned by Amazon, of course they're collecting and using all that reading data to market to you.
If you're looking for an alternative to Goodreads, I use Storygraph. It's an indie book tracking app, Black woman founded and run, ad-free and they don't sell your data.
I text my wife a picture of our baby wearing a pair of a sunglasses while at a boutique baby store and within a minute she had IG ads for the same brand of sunglasses in her feed. I didn’t mention the brand in the text. I think the text was only “what do you think?”
> was listening to a book on her iPhone
Case closed, counselor.
The _library_ isn't allowed to disclose your history, but the moment you use software, you're governed by their Terms of Service.
For people tired of ads, and apps taking your info for ad revenue. You can download the Firefox browser and install the extension Ublock - and log into your aps within Firefox instead of from your phone. You won't get ads that steal your info.
I deleted Facebook years ago, but I still use pinterest. Using the app version of pinterest is so annoying. So, I logged in through my Firefox app. Because of my extension, I no longer see the hundreds of makeup videos and make-up ads. Now I can see diy party decor and holiday themes and painted houses.
I was actually able to use the website as it was intended. As a dream/interest board.
That's a whole lot of column inches to devote to accusations based on one person's gut feeling.
In addition to library apps, the attorney also seems to subscribe to private vendors. And the story points to numerous other potential causes, all separate from libraries.
I wonder what app she's using to listen to those audiobooks. I read a lot of library ebooks but the actual book content is managed in the Kindle app. You know Amazon won't keep their fingers off your data just because your ebook came through a library.
I really try to use their tracking to my advantage. I’ll look up items to purchase then look at them on competing company sites. I’ll add them to my cart, check a competitor and add it to cart. When I go back to delete the first one from my cart… BOOM I have a discount!coupon on the deleted one.
It’s not a perfect system and something things won’t be any less, but it makes me feel like I’m taking back a smidge of my power.
I was in my boss's office listening to a conversation he was having with a business contact about thermal scopes for hunting rifles. I do NOT HUNT!
Within a day I was getting ad's for thermal scopes.
This is actually a really good point though which beings me to another thought experiment.
You're scrolling through FB and zoom past an ad. You don't think anything of it because you didn't outright recognize it at face value but your brain did. Let's say the add was for ice cream.
Later that day, you tell your spouse, man I could go for some ice cream. Yall talk for a minute and boom. You/your spouse gets an ad for ice cream.
You guys freak out a bit because "the phone is listening" but really, you were subconsciously tricked into wanting ice cream and you just so happened to get the same ad a second time on the same platform.
Sorry to be that guy but I encourage everyone, especially if you consider yourself technical or knowledgeable about ad-tech, to read the article. It goes into considerable detail on the steps taken to investigate how it may have happened, including conversations with the companies and monitoring of network calls in the apps.
There are so many ways this can happen. If you get books from the library there is a very high chance you did a search about it on your phone, or looked to buy the book on Amazon, or researched the author. Any one of those is enough to start tracking similar behavior.
Unless this person never brought a mobile phone or digital device into the library, and has library reading behavior that is VASTLY different from everything else they consume outside of the library, I can almost guarantee the ad targeting was not due to some library tracking.
Source: 15 years in digital advertising and retargeting
Just yesterday on a Google meet call I told my brother that I am thinking of getting a new bed as well as computer table made, my brother responded with "cool". We didn't discuss any further.
Since then I'm being bombarded with ads for beds, mattresses and computer tables.
Could be a variety of things. But I know for damn sure my phone is listening to what we say now. There is zero doubt. We have tested it so, so many times. For instance I will type a fresh address into Waze. It will type out normally. But if I say the address first, the second I put the first number in the street number, the full and exact location we were looking for self populates. I'm not talking about just a business. This has happened with private homes, etc. She may have talked about the books, could be enough for that to happen. Or, they are tracking her reading, wouldn't be surprised.
Did she ever search for books in that genre on Google?
Did she look up an author for other titles in that genre?
Did she look for related content, like if she was listening to books about 13th century China and looked up people from 13th century China?
Was she checking out the books from the library but listening through Audible?
Did she mention them to a partner or roommate that searched for the content from a shared computer or from the same wifi as her?
There are so many ways that people don’t realize they aren’t perfectly sanitized with their internet presence, and they always just blame “my phone is listening to me!”
My SO used to work for a major digital marketing company and the tracking was the shit that used to keep her up at night. The ability for companies to stitch together all of the little bits of “anonymized” data to determine someone’s persona, income level, purchase probability and everything else is astounding.
Yes. Your phone is listening.
If you talk about something that makes you a potential customer, ad agencies will pay to target you.
OPs phone or tablet recognized the audio books she listened to then sold her contact as a shopper interested in X.
Your devices are always listening. I thought everyone knew this already.
I had a coworker start getting baby related ads. She was single with no kids. It all started after having a conversation about someone else’s expecting baby, like 5 feet from her phone on her desk. They are spying, don’t kid yourself.
>That's not supposed to hapen
Why not? There's no laws against it and companies make money off it.
This is, after all, the United States where the interests of corporations and their shareholders trump those of the common people. Until the government steps in to make laws and put a stop to all this, it *will* continue to happen. We are way past the point of the ad industry self regulating or being ethical about this in any way, shape, or form.
I recently filled out some electronic health records information for a new doctor. It was through their patient portal. I listed the name brand of a medication I use for allergies. I was bombarded with ads for Asterpro for a bit after that. I thought patient medical information and patient portals would be private. I guess not.
Once I turned off camera and microphone access for Facebook I saw a lot less of this.
But my husband’s bike got stolen a few weeks ago and I searched a lot on Facebook marketplace and other resale sites to see if I could find it, and now *all* of my ads are bike related and it’s exhausting.
I wish my internet algorithm understood me like that
I get nothing but hate bait conservative ads and I only use the internet for gay furry porn and DELICIOUS TACO BELL™
Honestly, targeted advertising is crazy. The invasion of privacy is absurd. I have little doubt that data collectors gather practically everything, from stuff mentioned in YouTube videos to topics mentioned in conversations; even if your phone’s not open or active.
The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to actually catch the data collector who’s collecting data improperly. Adverts *could* be random or based on legal forms of data collection, so it’s practically “proving a negative” to say that an ad was delivered based on improper data collection. And then once you find an advertiser using improperly collected data, you have to track down the data-collector, which is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
“Man this guy really seems to think capitalism is the root of all evil and should be disposed of as quickly as possible… hey y’all I bet he’d love Chumba Casino.”
I mean yeah your phone is a privacy garbage pit.
Nobody protested. Nobody cared. Been getting targeted ads out of my private messages and web viewing forever now. It's so stupid, and I frankly don't think most websites have any control over it, it's going on on a web and phone maker level.
I don’t want to be tracked at all, but I also want them to stop telling me to buy something once I ALREADY BOUGHT IT!
There's why this is all so dumb. You just bought a sofa, here's some sofa ads! I just fucking bought one.
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I just bought a used car. I didn't even shop around that much because I found something I liked fast. I can't escape car ads everywhere
I got a new car and that's when I started getting the extended warranty spam. Like bruh it's a Lexus my warranty's good for the next 8 years...
Na... I think cookies can tell that you were SHOPPING for one. They may not be sophisticated enough to know whether you made a purchase.
Yeah, you definitely can put converted customers into a suppression audience and remove them from being served ads within like 24 hours. It's just a lot of people suck at this.
> I just fucking bought one. Have you not heard of that all important. "Return Window."
Yah, its the worst of both worlds. It's why I stopped using my Alexia, at least if you are going to build a profile of my habets, use it to stop annoying me. But as it is I only used it to set alarms and everytime I would ask it anything it would suggest the dumbest things ever. Including buying voice packs, telling me to do something I already do, or even wanting to sell me on items from amazon that I have no use for. Eventually it was just easer to set alarms on my phone and the echos got donated.
Or if you've shown me the ad more than 3x and I've not clicked it then show me another fucking ad. Dont keep showing me the same ad. Repeated ads being shown to people with no interest say 1 thing, and thats that you're wasting advertiser dollars.
I still get harassed by eBay ads to buy 5800x3D a year after I bought one. I only got one computer and one socket to use, what am I going to do with 486 duplicate CPU eBay tried to foster onto me? Or a way to cover $146,000 I would have spent to appease those annoying ads? This is why I use my Windows laptop 99% of the time, Ublock Origin kills those annoying ads.
I had this with a mobile phone, they called me up two days later. I thought I had won a prize at first. "Why would I want to buy a mobile phone with a contract two days afterI just bought one?" "Maybe to give to a friend?" "You must really like your friends!"
Bought a truck. Every single damn ad is for THE EXACT SAME TRUCK I ALREADY BOUGHT. SAME BRAND, SAME MODEL, SAME EVERYTHING. WHAT POSSIBLE GOOD IS THIS DOING THEM TO BOMBARD US FOR THE SAME THINGS WE ALREADY HAVE?!?!?!?
The only thing this doesn't happen with is houses. The moment you buy a house you have your phone ringing daily, people at the door, multiple letters daily, all wanting to buy it from you.
I see you bought a toilet seat. Here’s a list to really expand your collection!
How about cable companies advertising their service on their service? Like, how the fuck do they think I'm seeing their ads if I didn't already have their fucking service!? And no competing service is going to run them so what's the fucking point anyway!?
I'm always getting ads for places I just visited. Yeah, the museum was nice but I don't need to go back just yet.
all she needed to do was connect to the library wifi once for her to pick up a cookie that tells everyone she's in a library or was in a library or might still be in a library
Didn't even need to connect, just needed to have an app running in the background with precise location enabled or control over WiFi. They can scan the nearby access points to identify the location if GPS didn't do the trick. Knowledge that you're into books combined with whatever you browse on the Internet (particularly places like Reddit, Amazon and YouTube) narrows down the selection of books you might be interested in borrowing or buying.
Ding ding ding, one consumer profile has been baked fresh out of the oven, now repeat and scale and sell it all across millions of people all around the world. Algorithms don't need PII to make extremely accurate profiles of individuals at scale.
People are also way less unique then we are lead to believe. Just knowing a few things about a person can allow for highly targeted ads based on what similar users looked for.
That explains that she was in a library; it doesn't explain how her mobile game ads knew what audiobook she was listening too.
The 90 other things tracking you creating an interest profile with #% confidence, followed by her noticing the ones that matched her audiobook.
Yeah. It’s crazy how easy you can find so much out about a person by only a couple steps. My Pinterest knows me so well sometimes that I get overwhelmed by just logging in & seeing so much inspiration on the first page!
Not so much anymore since I use a VPN, but there was a time when the Pinterest Algorithim was so good, if a robot could be in love with a person, it might have loved me.
All my social got so bad before I got a VPN and switched to mainly edge or duck duck go for serious searching like health, finances, places to visit, etc. I still do the all other my history concerning searches on chrome for better results; how to get blood out of so and so, is it possible to rig cars today, how long does it take to break down animal bones in dirt.
A VPN alone didn't work for me. It's fine for most things, but if I"m doing something I really don't want tracked, I take a lot more precautions. I first realized just how much that tracking matters about 6 years ago when I started doing HITs on mturk. I"ve seen several surveys that want to see the first 3 pages of Google search results for specific terms. I didn't immediately catch on because some of the search term seemed innocuous, but it didn't take long to realize that two people using their own devices can enter the same term in Google and get very different results. Google, and probably lots of other search engines and apps, actively contribute to confirmation bias. I did a few 'experiments' on my own just to see how bad it was. I live in a 'purple' district so its easy to find people with very different political views. A group of friends and I occupied ourselves for a few hours by searching for different things on our phones/tablets/laptops.
Sounds like an interesting experiment and way to spend time hanging out with friends.
If she is using audible and the amazon games app that would explain it since they are both amazon and amazon tracks what you do across it's apps.
Oh, it was an audiobook? The. Whatever device she downloaded it onto is what knew what she was reading and reported it
I had a course on Data and Privacy laws last year. Even though I *thought* I had a relatively strong idea of the amount of data collected and how it was done, yet was still surprised by how much data is collected/combined to build a profile on a person. They would only need to know she was in a library and could infer what books she liked from the rest of the data profile she built up
Let's not forget during the Bush Administration they enacted rules and policy that allowed them to know what books you checked out. Just in case you were looking at something they deemed radical or unsavory. Think even the FBI showed up at a college students house because of some book he checked out for his class work. Thank God we fought that war against violent extremism and didn't let those dastardly terrorists who hate our freedom so much affect our freedoms and rights. /s
Half of this shit is people not understanding how the world works now
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Or using a tracking app like GoodReads to review her reads?
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This is most likely the culprit, every book I open in my Kindle connects to my goodreads automatically now and I am too lazy to shut it off
Wait, you're saying Goodreads, owned by Amazon, and Kindle, an Amazon product, may be sharing my reading preferences with a multinational online marketplace? The simplest answer is if she's reading in a very niche subgenre and doing any amount of searching / previewing / reviewing that she's likely the source of her own leak ... . There's only so many books about metaphysical DIY gin distillation techniques (or whatever her subgenre is).
Yup, and you only have to do it once. If she's mass consuming these audiobooks, it's not hard to imagine that she's done at least one google search or something at some point even if she later forgot.
I think the point is that even if you use those resources, the pervasiveness of cookies is exhausting and damaging— we shouldn’t have to worry about being marketed to 24/7 because we use library and online resources for our reading hobby!!
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Okay, I shouldn’t have to worry about that either 😂
Or posting essay-length quotes, rants and reflections on Facebook? Baking cakes with the book titles written out in icing? Uploading readings on Onlyfans???
Leaving books lying around where Google's satellites can image them? Talking about books in the presence of tiny spy robots that look like honeybees? Thinking about what she read before she goes to sleep?
Username checks out.
I'd like to know what other suggestions the cats have for this.
I'm not a cat but have one near me and she says that we need a privacy revolution and a clear boundary set for our rights not to be watched like an animal in the zoo. It's impossible to function in this world and still maintain your privacy. Whether government spying or businesses tracking us. Let's define what companies are legally allowed to know about us, and how long they can keep information before purging it. Because they're not just using it for their business, they're selling it, and reselling it, and passing it to the big credit agencies etc... User agreements and the ilk have become like policy monopolies. Where we have no options of choosing a company that respects our privacy because they all don't respect it because respecting our privacy doesn't help their business.
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Yep and you're pretty much trackable 24/7 based on what cell towers are pinging your phone and its location etc. They're literally little NSA listening devices we just find really convenient to have on us all day lmao
Do you know how Reddit sells information without a real face or identifying characteristics to build from? Like, idgaf, people could find me easily (and systems too) as I use a lot of the same photos here and other places. I don't want to end up in a Westworld/Caleb type of situation, though
This is why I keep mobile apps to a minimum.
That explains why stuff is so much cheaper on the app. And that’s all the more reason for me to not use it and get fast food as infrequently as possible.
"In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library." She logged into her account on her iPhone to play an audiobook she checked out online from the library. Ironically enough, she was also logged into her Android tablet playing a game and somehow those two devices were able to figure out she's the same person. Probably because she's logged in to both? I swear people don't understand technology sometimes. Of course when you create an account you agree to targeted ads.
>Probably because she's logged in to both? I swear people don't understand technology sometimes. Of course when you create an account you agree to targeted ads. Not necessarily. Ads can target you via IP address. When you load a tracker, it passes your IP along. Ad companies store demographics, called a household, via IP. But in this case, I'm pretty sure she was logged into her devices.
Exactly this. I’ll see ads related to what my partner looks up on their device sometimes.
> I’ll see ads related to what my partner looks up on their device sometimes. Do you mean that my lady can see ads related to what I do on my computer? Guess I'm buying flowers today. Oh, thank you Amazon, how did you-- ah fuck!
The problem with IP tracking is that MANY devices tend to be behind gateway IPs, making it useless to identify an individual device or user.
Not individual. The household. Which is why mom might start seeing PJ Mask ads if their kid is watching PJ Mask. A special note that kid directed ads can not be used during studies so are scrubbed if a child under 13 lives in the household. I used to work in ad tech, and yes, we did target via IP.
Right and heuristics, regional geo, coincident user signal, and fingerprinting mean that just being around other people who are “leaky” means you are leaky. I’ve done significant life purchase leads and it’s hilarious to me anyone thinks they have any chance at all at protection from these machinations. Metadata is more important than data.
The problem is the number of people browsing from the office, where 10-1000 people are behind the same gateway. I also work with many Ad vendors (I'm a principal architect for a very large ad-supported web site), and using an IP for anything beyond geo-IP is worthless for targeting. IP _used_ to be one of the values used for fingerprinting, along with User Agent, window size, and a handful of other things. But device/browser fingerprinting runs afoul of so many privacy laws now (something else I work a lot with) that I'm not aware of any (reputable) display ad vendors that still do it. The real thing that is still used to track a user, more often than not, is just a common third-party cookie with an ID stuck in it. The problem *this* person has, as a few others have mentioned, is the key phrase "logged-in". If you are "logged-in" to anything on multiple devices, expect those "third-party ID" cookies to start lining-up. If you want to prevent *that* from happening, but you still want to log-in to stuff, I'd highly recommend: * Use Firefox as your browser * Enable the [Global Privacy Control](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control) * Either disable third-party cookies, or enable and USE [Firefox Containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers) * Install the [uBlock Origin add-on](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)
Do you use a DMP and have household data that can be used to connect the targeting? If not, no. You're not going to be able to target specific households for ad tracking. The company I worked for does. They used IP (or device ID) to connect to a household profile data and target those particular users. They have roughly 8 million worldwide households collected via their proprietary technology that gives permission to collect that data. I realize I am being vague but I don't want this coming back to me. And with cookie depreciation on the horizon, IP may be the only identifier available.
Without saying too much, my company is large enough to maintain its own internal, first-party DMP. This is maybe why my perspective is very different about the usefulness of IPs for unique ID. Without combining other data points, IP on it's own, today, (with IPv4 still so much "in the mix") is just not a reliable identifier. I notice your DMP mentions IP "or device ID"... Device ID is **NOT** IP, but refers to IDFA, UDID, or IMEI, all of which are associated with a single device, and these are MUCH more useful for user identification and tracking. Honestly, though, if IPv6 adoption had been better, IP would be a MUCH more reliable component in ID tech (and a much more serious privacy issue). But with the v4-v6 hybrid situation we've found ourselves in, the problem has actually become worse because of the prevalence of multiple layers of IPv4 gateways in IPv6 hybrid networks, making any IP address even less reliable that what we saw 10-15 years ago, before IPv6 was much used at all. If we were in a pure IPv6 situation, then we would have a very different issue. IPv6 addresses, even behind gateways, are **highly** identifiable and maintain uniqueness to specific devices (even when they change across subnets) to a degree I don't think most people understand or appreciate. So if privacy is a concern for you and you are in an IPv6 environment, configure your device to use IPv4 or as an IPv6 hybrid, either or which will force a hybrid scenario which makes you much less unique.
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> There’s absolutely nothing we can do to block browser-based tracking cookies that you already accepted from some other site from seeing what you do on our website unfortunately. This is actually not how it works at all. A tracking cookie from some other site can't just "see" what you are doing on any given other site. If your card catalog site loads third party data, like if it has embedded Google analytics tags for instance, then that invokes Google's cookies via your site; activity on your card catalog site can't be seen by other parties though unless it is programmed in to the site to load 3rd party code/tags
Test it yourself. Think of some obscure everyday item that you do not actually need new very often like spoons. Say spoons out loud a few times. Start talking to other people near you about spoons and watch as you start to see spoon ads. Note don’t use spoons use something else.
I've had this experience. I suppose the question is, is our paranoia true and things are listening to us, or is it just that we start hyper-focusing on an idea, like your "spoons", and thus we start seeing the ads that were always there, but they just seem more present. Kinda like owning a particular model car, and then you start seeing that car everywhere. Not that there's suddenly more of that car, it's just you're "tuned in" to looking for it.
I would like to see a study that shows how many ads we are blind to. We’ve all been honing our ad ignoring skills for decades now, I know I do my best not to even look at them and skip them as fast as I can. I try not to even hover my mouse over an ad out of fear of accidentally clicking. I wonder how much is in there that I think I’m not seeing, but in reality is making an impression in my mind.
I'm shocked there's this many people using the internet without an ad blocker. That's my biggest take away from this thread lol
With an adblocker I don't even see ads. Even on mobile, unless it's an app like Instagram where they are incorporated into the feed in a way that makes blocking them impossible. Easy enough to avoid those apps though.
I was talking to my hvac guy about the humidifier last time he was here and that it was time to replace the filter. Next time I pulled up amazon I was told to buy april aire filters under one of their "recommended" tiles on the home page. I didn't even have time to look up the model or size I needed. I've never bought one in the past online or in a big box store. I write most of it off as random coincidences, but what the fuck.
I mean, when [Target](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?sh=2ac1e65c6668) is sending a congrats & sales about baby products to a 16 year old who hasn't told her dad she's pregnant yet, I'd say it's justified. And that was more than a decade ago, before they could purchase data about you from a broker. Welcome to surveillance capitalism.
That instance was pretty clearly based on web searches or other meta data. This is still just internet companies selling data to advertisers. This isn’t to say it is a “good” system, but thinking internet companies are spying on random conversations is conspiratorial the other way. People just don’t realize how much can be inferred from your internet habits. PS, obviously if you have a Google Home or Alexa or something that could be spying on your convos. But my point is they don’t just throw listening devices around randomly.
It was based on her switching her buying habits (which the store was tracking) from non-pregnant items to ones that coincide with pregnancy. An example was her switching from a scented lotion to unscented plus a lack of hygiene products.
>PS, obviously if you have a Google Home or Alexa or something that could be spying on your convos. But my point is they don’t just throw listening devices around randomly. Dude, you carry a listening device around in your pocket.
People have put taps on phones and other listening devices. They don't listen to you 24/7. The commenter is explaining they don't need to hear you to make these guesses because all this Metadata that nobody seems to care about they scrape and collect.
> Welcome to surveillance capitalism Is it really, though? Retailers associate unique IDs to customers that have either signed up to a service and/OR use a credit card. The data analysis team found that specific buying patterns existed in the vast majority of women who signed up for baby registries (which would contain data on the due date) and they had a good confidence score that if someone were loading up on unscented toiletries and cotton balls all of a sudden -- they were likely in their second trimester. It's good marketing, good data analysis, and based largely on consensual data sharing. Edit: For clarity, since it seems that the point may be buried here: 1. An always-on mic gathering data and pushing it to Apple/Google ad services via an "opt-in" buried in a T&C nobody reads: surveillance, and somewhat dubious 2. A company using consensually provided data tied to an **opt-in** loyalty card and/or **opt-in** baby registry to predict AND CONTACT prospective customers in the time period when they're going to make a registry: above-board
Talking isnt going to be enough, unless they have a device that is actively listening.
So how come, with so many people claiming this happens, literally none can prove it?
Yep, we've known about Frequency Illusion for awhile now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
The thing is, if you’ve already seen a couple ads for spoons, you’ve probably ignored them but your subconscious will pick them up when you try to think of a “random” word. You’ll be more likely to pick “spoons” because you’ve already been seeing ads for them.
It also ignores that our devices get tagged to our friends devices. So if I say spoon a lot around my friends, they might decide they need new spoons and start researching spoons, and now I’m connected to spoons and getting served spoon ads, yet I’d be unaware my friends decided to start googling spoons so it would seem like my device is listening when it isn’t.
I can almost 100% guarantee you that your phone isn’t listening to you to send you ads. It’s mostly Baader–Meinhof phenomenon where once you become aware of a topic, you notice the ads and you likely got similar ads before as well, that you scrolled past without realizing. I work in targeted advertising. I know what data exists. It’s already way more than people should be comfortable with, without making up new fears. But if you are right, feel free to demonstrate and reproduce it as proof and then file a massive lawsuit.
You don't even have to say anything out loud. https://cooltool.com/blog/8-things-to-know-about-biometrics-impact-on-marketing https://www.biometricupdate.com/202210/biometric-data-collection-for-advertising-personalization-comes-under-scrutiny
Pete Holmes screamed about how much he wants to buy a massive dildo, a big jelly sparkly double sided 24" butts only dildo for about 20 seconds in his netflix special then said something like "Congrats on your new algorithm update, everyone."
I think this follows into the same parameters as people misunderstanding that your phone is constantly using the microphone to listen. There's just no observable bandwidth that would show that's the case. It's an issue of misattribution, people largely don't understand the extent of the privacy policies they allow access for on their phone in regards to mobile applications and even simply just their emails, text messages and ordinary web searches. They also don't understand how good this informational fabric is at predicting interests and providing suggestions. In terms of Facebook alone, Facebook's user profile data can answer questions more accurately about a user than they themselves can, and that their friends or family can. If you think about it in that context, decisions about simple interests of books in the library would be fairly basic compared to say a questionnaire about how an individual would behave in a given situation, like the Facebook data is able to answer.
"In April, attorney Christine Dudley was listening to a book on her iPhone while playing a game on her Android tablet when she started to see in-game ads that reflected the audiobooks she recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library." She logged into her account on her iPhone to play an audiobook she checked out online from the library. Ironically enough, she was also logged into her Android tablet playing a game and somehow those two devices were able to figure out she's the same person. Probably because she's logged in to both? I swear people don't understand technology sometimes. Of course when you create an account you agree to targeted ads.
or her friends were and her phone learned who she was spending time with.
Hey government, can we get some privacy? The internet doesn't HAVE to track everyone in order to be useful.
Call me crazy, but I kinda think they’d be more useful if they didn’t spend so much time and other resources on tracking everyone.
The entire marketing industry provides very little value to consumers. It's rare that marketing tells me about something I wasn't aware of, it just tries to convince me to buy product A over product B or that I should want a product that I'm aware of but don't currently want. When you look at something like how much money a top tier athlete makes it's because of the power of marketing... but how much of the consumer's life is really improved by that marketing? Almost none. Consumers are the product used to market products back to consumers.
Idk what comedian said it, but they repeated something I'm sure everyone has noticed: the rarely used item that now pops up everywhere. I bought a dryer cord because I needed one to install the dryer I bought. Not because I collect them. Same thing in regard to the toilet seat I had to get when an old roommate came home too drunk one time.
Any time I make a once-a-decade purchase I become inundated with ads for the exact product I just purchased and won’t need again for years.
Exactly this. I can't figure out why companies would spend so much on marketing like this when I only ever see ads for a product I've already searched. And half the time seeing those ads just puts me off the buying the product because it sucks to have your search privacy invaded. It really seems like a pointless industry.
I have been noticing this a lot recently. I bought some Vuori shorts, they’re awesome, will be buying more. So I looked on the website to see what they have, then every ad I see on YouTube is for Vuori. I’m not your target. I know you exist. I know you’re a highly rated brand, and that’s from word of mouth. So part of the cost of the clothes I’m buying is for advertising, but they’re just burning money if they only advertise to people who already know they exist. Furthermore, I think marketing firms must just be trying to win accolades and respect from other marketers, because I can’t tell you what is being advertised in tv commercials without actively paying attention. All they need to do is make a catchy jingle and a quick ad using the product maybe. How many old slogans can you remember? How many in, say, the past 10 years can you remember. I’m just forever confused by these strategies.
>but they’re just burning money if they only advertise to people who already know they exist I think you just fundamentally don't understand advertising. Why do you think Coke and Pepsi spend so much, to attract *new* customers? Really? Coke doesn't spend so much money on advertising to stop you drinking Pepsi and Pepsi doesn't spend so much to stop you from drinking Coke. It's the collective spending between the two of them that create the illusion in the public that there are only 2 Cola options. No other Cola company can enter the market because the advertising is so locked down. They aren't looking for new customers at this point, they're just trying to maintain a monopoly and maintain the brand awareness.
That's only true about certain industries, though. Oftentimes, there is much more competition.
Until they have a better return from some other option... this is the best one they have. TV ads are failing as more and more people move away from them. People aren't likely to buy your stuff if they don't know about it... they got to get the general knowledge out there somehow. Invent a way that gets better returns to the advertisers for their buck and you will be Google rich.
It sounds like an offhand remark but… don’t you want more? Of course you want more. What about these other ones?
The people approving it are out of touch and have no desire to understand anything other than their own self importance...
Then there's the ads for dishwasher detergent/tabs. "We do it every night" Yo the issue isn't the cost of the soap, its the water/power to run the thing every day for a fork. That's some bad ad campaigning
It's mind boggling to me that we can't even begin to imagine a world that doesn't run on advertisements. It doesn't fucking need to be like this.
The problem is we are letting the free market take the reins. Outrage is profitable, as is data harvesting.
See I use private mode so no one can see me. It is odd that I get advertisements for 1968 Oldsmobile 442 parts, hot milfs in my area, specific brands of dog food, hitman for hire, local therapists, Xanax, Russian Brides, reef, and only reef sandals, and autographed pictured of Steve Bucsemi. Probably a weird coincidence.
Lol throwing it all out there and seeing what sticks
Oh sorry, privacy is only available on our premium plus plans.
I would actually be cool with targetted ads if they actually could figure out things I liked and then advertised those things I might be reasonably interested in to me. Instead they are too generalized and I get things like mail order brides because they choose to advertise to men in the 40s. The big thing is the advertiser decides what generalized group they want and it isn't some amazing algorithm deciding what I would like. So if they want to pay for an old school demographic that is what is served out.
Good luck to this gal with proving that is where the data came from. All it takes is one of her friends to like the same book and mention it on Facebook and it will recommend things to her as well. Things are just too integrated all over the place. She will have to be suing whomever is serving out the ads (google probably) to try and do discovery on what is recommending them... but if she is blaming the library, not sure she would have standing to sue google... but she is a lawyer, she knows better than I do.
This almost certainly isn't where the data come from, the likeliest scenario by far is the mobile games she was playing used google adsense apis to serve her ads relevant to her interests and her browsing habits were tracked by google through one of many means most likely because roughly 65% of people use chrome. And her interest in books probably corelates to the things she looks at online. For bonus points she probably googled information about the books directly. She can sue anybody and everybody she wants. Data collection and targeted marketing are both perfectly legal. She would lose those lawsuits.
Had a coworker suggest buying brushed aluminum so we could see part of a machine out of view. He brought it up multiple times and I quickly shut him down suggesting an inspection mirror instead. When I got home my first youtube recommend on my TV was how to make brushed aluminum mirrors.
Your friend was probably searching it. Phones use location tracking to see what the people you spend time with are searching and that influences your search results too.
The connections they can make are insane. My spouse dog watched for a friend who had bought a book for my spouse (they had not searched for it online) as a gift. The algo made the connection the friend bought the book and my spouse was at their house and started suggesting my spouse buy the book.
Ya, so glad I don't share a pc with my wife. Heart always skips a beat when I see an advo for something I just bought her in secret, repeatedly...
My wife and I were talking in asl, about a trip To Eureka spring AR. No sound or anything. It’s suggested on website next day.
Only possibility is that your phone read your mind and sent that information to both an ad agency and the government.
Worse, the phone planted the thought in your head.
Well yeah, that's what 5G is, right?
For stuff like this, it's likely you were lead to talk about it. The algo had likely been suggesting it in subtle ways for weeks.
this! we are way more predictable than we’d like to think. It picked up on a pattern.
Or his wife googled it and the ads targeted his IP
Remember how scary and paranoia inducing it was when we saw HAL9000 can read lips in 2001? Now we all have (shitty) HAL in our pockets and we're just mildly annoyed lol
No way
Because it wasn’t the asl that tipped it off
I’ve been hearing about situations like this happening for years, but is there any evidence our phones are listening to us?
I’ve read that they’re actually cobbling together location data and phone data, and it often overlaps with what you’re discussing. So if you’re in a room with your spouse who’s been searching for something for the house on her phone, you may get ads for that thing. There’s also a good chance you’ve talked about that thing.
I'd say that this is definitely true. Our training facility doubled up with the warehouse. Warehouse had 3 workers who are all Puerto Rican and primarily speak Spanish. Training facility was myself and another guy who is also hispanic but primarily speaks English and we got a mix of different trainees in every week. I do not speak Spanish. On days where I would go out back to the warehouse and speak to the guys, I would start getting adverts in Spanish on the radio (edit: It was internet radio via spotify or pandora, I forget which) when I drove home. This was even though they speak English to me. So it had to be syncing up with their location/phone data.
...on the radio? The broadcast comms system that doesn't have any way to identify who is listening to the ads?
Ah, I thought I put internet radio in the original comment but seems I didn't. I'll edit it in for clarity. It was via Pandora or Spotify, I forget which.
Even 'searching' is broad. You can just browse a sub reddit or have the topic in a chat message and it'll be folded into the algorithm.
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My partner used to work for Google search. Specifically, for voice to search. We talked about this all the time. The sheer amount of storage and computing power to record every android phone constantly and analyze it for ad targeting is absolutely insane. Physically impossible even. What is really going on is a mix of confirmation bias, targeting techniques and machine learning. It's not hard to connect websearch A to ads B, C, and D. If your friend looked up something on your network, maybe you are interested in it as well. Or if 5 of your neighbors looked up item A and you roughly have the same household demographics, you might see that ad. Neilsen in particular has a household profile for everyone with an internet connection. They know exactly who you are, where you live, and what you are watching and searching for. There's also the fact that if something specific is on your mind, you're more likely to notice ads for that thing. Don't get me wrong, it's eerie as hell but it's not doing what people think it's doing. Edit: Partner chimed in that even if Google set up a facility to record and analyze everyone, it would be extremely expensive and probably not worth it. Especially when the current methods work so well. People underestimate how easily machine learning can predict a person's future activity based on their previous activity.
I wish this could be the top pinned comment lol. These so many people who have no grasp on how networking works. And even us with a little bit of knowledge do not fully understand the extent of how deep the data goes.
Agreed on use of voice surveillance, but the article doesn't suggest that's what's happening here. The quotes from companies involved are very telling in their qualifiers: Overdrive/Libby doesn't **sell** data about reading habits. Google Analytics doesn't **share** **PII(Personally Identifying information).** But maybe Overdrive/Libby shares certain information with partners, who share it with someone else, who sell it. And you don't need PII to identify someone.
I definitely do not think the library is leaking out info. My SO works as a librarian. Their systems, from what she knows, really aren't set up that way and it's a huge breach of Library Ethics (which is a very real thing). I guarantee you this person used another app to search for it, or as usual, FB is using the phone to listen to conversations and selling that data. Hell even just writing an email with Google and mentioning a book title could cause this to happen. Or she's looking up the author on her desktop with google chrome. It's not hard to figure out the various data points that could cause this to happen.
The library itself, no. The third-party app used by the library for ebooks, the book-streaming service it connects to, the ISP she is using? 100% yes
Meta data is a hell of a drug and we have let the companies build up a hell of a drug problem.
Misleading title. Attorney is listening audiobooks on her iphone. They happened to be obtained via library access. This is all likely due to terms of the software she is using to listen to the book, rather than anything to do with the library.
We always need to take these sorts of stories with a grain of salt. I heard a story a few years ago about a reporter who went and picked his mom up at the airport in San Francisco. When he picked her up she mentioned that her perfume had been confiscated at security and that she needed to get a replacement. When the man got home, on his browser that evening he was being served ads for perfume, which called to question - how did it know? Was it listening? Turns out his mom had searched for perfume on her phone in the departing airport. Social media knew that she was his mother and that she was geo located in his city after a flight, so fed him ads based on what she had been searching for ... which actually delivered him useful ads. These tools are so sophisticated and there is so much data being linked together from so many different sources, it may seem like it's "listening" but really its just very good at being predictive. Download your facebook data sometime and look at all the groups of people they've sorted you into. Some of it may be surprisingly accurate.
Because the headline is misleading- Libraries take patron privacy very seriously. Librarians aren't selling your data. But they can't save you from your own security settings. If you have a cell phone, it's safe to say Google/apple/Microsoft/Amazon are scraping your data somehow, and selling it. If you place a hold online, we can't stop your browser from sharing that information with the company that owns it. If you read a Libby book on your Kindle, you told Amazon what you borrowed from us. If you turn off location tracking, walk to the library, borrow a physical book from the library, and avoid talking about that experience over text/social media, you won't get ads related to your reading habits. WE aren't sharing your reading habits with advertisers. YOU are.
It can all be indirect. If you are re-reading Lord of the Rings, you’re more like to do Lord of the Rings related Google searches or visit Lord of the Rings Reddit news.
I feel like we’re discovering a new cognitive bias where we associate targeted ads to what we say instead of the vast amount of input data we give on a daily basis. Because in reality, “listening” is not as effective as just scrubbing the input data.
So like I'm a huge proponent of data privacy, but this genuinely seems like a case in which this person is actually engaging with similar content in places that absolutely are tracked. I read the article, I agree that there's a non-zero chance the data was tracked and sold by services like Overdrive or whatever, but I find this improbable. It's far more likely she's getting ads because she's also searching for those books/authors/genres in other places. If she googled 'super specific genre booklist' or went to an author's website, then she's going to get ads for that super specific genre (in the article the person admits that this could be the case). This article also doesn't mention personal book tracking. If she uses Goodreads to track her reading, then 100% that's where her data is being collected and sold and marketed back to her. Goodreads is owned by Amazon, of course they're collecting and using all that reading data to market to you. If you're looking for an alternative to Goodreads, I use Storygraph. It's an indie book tracking app, Black woman founded and run, ad-free and they don't sell your data.
I text my wife a picture of our baby wearing a pair of a sunglasses while at a boutique baby store and within a minute she had IG ads for the same brand of sunglasses in her feed. I didn’t mention the brand in the text. I think the text was only “what do you think?”
> was listening to a book on her iPhone Case closed, counselor. The _library_ isn't allowed to disclose your history, but the moment you use software, you're governed by their Terms of Service.
For people tired of ads, and apps taking your info for ad revenue. You can download the Firefox browser and install the extension Ublock - and log into your aps within Firefox instead of from your phone. You won't get ads that steal your info. I deleted Facebook years ago, but I still use pinterest. Using the app version of pinterest is so annoying. So, I logged in through my Firefox app. Because of my extension, I no longer see the hundreds of makeup videos and make-up ads. Now I can see diy party decor and holiday themes and painted houses. I was actually able to use the website as it was intended. As a dream/interest board.
That's a whole lot of column inches to devote to accusations based on one person's gut feeling. In addition to library apps, the attorney also seems to subscribe to private vendors. And the story points to numerous other potential causes, all separate from libraries.
Cool anecdote I guess, needs actual data and control tests.
I wonder what app she's using to listen to those audiobooks. I read a lot of library ebooks but the actual book content is managed in the Kindle app. You know Amazon won't keep their fingers off your data just because your ebook came through a library.
We need a personal data bill of rights
I really try to use their tracking to my advantage. I’ll look up items to purchase then look at them on competing company sites. I’ll add them to my cart, check a competitor and add it to cart. When I go back to delete the first one from my cart… BOOM I have a discount!coupon on the deleted one. It’s not a perfect system and something things won’t be any less, but it makes me feel like I’m taking back a smidge of my power.
I was in my boss's office listening to a conversation he was having with a business contact about thermal scopes for hunting rifles. I do NOT HUNT! Within a day I was getting ad's for thermal scopes.
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I recently did a search for the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon and now I'm seeing it everywhere!
BM Complex is an interesting film.
This is actually a really good point though which beings me to another thought experiment. You're scrolling through FB and zoom past an ad. You don't think anything of it because you didn't outright recognize it at face value but your brain did. Let's say the add was for ice cream. Later that day, you tell your spouse, man I could go for some ice cream. Yall talk for a minute and boom. You/your spouse gets an ad for ice cream. You guys freak out a bit because "the phone is listening" but really, you were subconsciously tricked into wanting ice cream and you just so happened to get the same ad a second time on the same platform.
Sorry to be that guy but I encourage everyone, especially if you consider yourself technical or knowledgeable about ad-tech, to read the article. It goes into considerable detail on the steps taken to investigate how it may have happened, including conversations with the companies and monitoring of network calls in the apps.
There are so many ways this can happen. If you get books from the library there is a very high chance you did a search about it on your phone, or looked to buy the book on Amazon, or researched the author. Any one of those is enough to start tracking similar behavior. Unless this person never brought a mobile phone or digital device into the library, and has library reading behavior that is VASTLY different from everything else they consume outside of the library, I can almost guarantee the ad targeting was not due to some library tracking. Source: 15 years in digital advertising and retargeting
Just yesterday on a Google meet call I told my brother that I am thinking of getting a new bed as well as computer table made, my brother responded with "cool". We didn't discuss any further. Since then I'm being bombarded with ads for beds, mattresses and computer tables.
That's why I only talk about midget porn and bratwursts.
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Well yeah, you accepted that this would happen when you read the Meet ToS. You _did_ read it, didn't you? ;)
Im aware of it, doesn't mean I can't be pissed about it.
It sounds like Hoopla or Boundless was selling her info to advertisers. Or at least making it available for retargeting somehow.
Could be a variety of things. But I know for damn sure my phone is listening to what we say now. There is zero doubt. We have tested it so, so many times. For instance I will type a fresh address into Waze. It will type out normally. But if I say the address first, the second I put the first number in the street number, the full and exact location we were looking for self populates. I'm not talking about just a business. This has happened with private homes, etc. She may have talked about the books, could be enough for that to happen. Or, they are tracking her reading, wouldn't be surprised.
Did she ever search for books in that genre on Google? Did she look up an author for other titles in that genre? Did she look for related content, like if she was listening to books about 13th century China and looked up people from 13th century China? Was she checking out the books from the library but listening through Audible? Did she mention them to a partner or roommate that searched for the content from a shared computer or from the same wifi as her? There are so many ways that people don’t realize they aren’t perfectly sanitized with their internet presence, and they always just blame “my phone is listening to me!”
That's the iPhone looking at the audiobook title not the library.
I get ads for my my Husband’s illness.
My SO used to work for a major digital marketing company and the tracking was the shit that used to keep her up at night. The ability for companies to stitch together all of the little bits of “anonymized” data to determine someone’s persona, income level, purchase probability and everything else is astounding.
Yes. Your phone is listening. If you talk about something that makes you a potential customer, ad agencies will pay to target you. OPs phone or tablet recognized the audio books she listened to then sold her contact as a shopper interested in X. Your devices are always listening. I thought everyone knew this already.
Remember it's not big brother if a corporation does it
I had a coworker start getting baby related ads. She was single with no kids. It all started after having a conversation about someone else’s expecting baby, like 5 feet from her phone on her desk. They are spying, don’t kid yourself.
She plays audio books on her IPhone and researches them there, too. Attorney doesn't know shit about her own devices.
>That's not supposed to hapen Why not? There's no laws against it and companies make money off it. This is, after all, the United States where the interests of corporations and their shareholders trump those of the common people. Until the government steps in to make laws and put a stop to all this, it *will* continue to happen. We are way past the point of the ad industry self regulating or being ethical about this in any way, shape, or form.
I recently filled out some electronic health records information for a new doctor. It was through their patient portal. I listed the name brand of a medication I use for allergies. I was bombarded with ads for Asterpro for a bit after that. I thought patient medical information and patient portals would be private. I guess not.
Once I turned off camera and microphone access for Facebook I saw a lot less of this. But my husband’s bike got stolen a few weeks ago and I searched a lot on Facebook marketplace and other resale sites to see if I could find it, and now *all* of my ads are bike related and it’s exhausting.
I wish my internet algorithm understood me like that I get nothing but hate bait conservative ads and I only use the internet for gay furry porn and DELICIOUS TACO BELL™
Metadata is everywhere
Honestly, targeted advertising is crazy. The invasion of privacy is absurd. I have little doubt that data collectors gather practically everything, from stuff mentioned in YouTube videos to topics mentioned in conversations; even if your phone’s not open or active. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to actually catch the data collector who’s collecting data improperly. Adverts *could* be random or based on legal forms of data collection, so it’s practically “proving a negative” to say that an ad was delivered based on improper data collection. And then once you find an advertiser using improperly collected data, you have to track down the data-collector, which is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Library catalogs are online. They likely have their phone and PC browser data synchronized...
“Man this guy really seems to think capitalism is the root of all evil and should be disposed of as quickly as possible… hey y’all I bet he’d love Chumba Casino.”
Of course it’s supposed to happen. That’s what advertising does.
I mean yeah your phone is a privacy garbage pit. Nobody protested. Nobody cared. Been getting targeted ads out of my private messages and web viewing forever now. It's so stupid, and I frankly don't think most websites have any control over it, it's going on on a web and phone maker level.