You know these algorithms are designed for predictive advertisement based off your previous activity. What is likely going on is this:
10,000 users who searched these terms also decided to search or want this “thing” next.
“Woah, it’s reading my mind! How did it know I was thinking about that?!”
It’s funny, nobody pays attention when the algorithm guesses wrong, we only notice it when it’s freakishly accurate.
Except when it’s YouTube recommendations, then they only pay attention when it’s wrong and not when it’s right.
What, you don’t want right wing misinformation shoved down your throat constantly despite reporting it every time you see it?
As if YouTube would ever get it right.
In that case it’s never right. 😑
Certain products use algorithms that predict you’re going to stop using it before you’re even aware. This can trigger things to sent you emails, etc with some perk.
And that makes it better?
No, but confirmation bias is a real thing.
Bingo. This one gets it.
Absolutely, but understanding that doesn’t make it any less creepy.
You can fight this you know. There are a lot of great YouTube video tutorials by MentalOutlaw that will help you tighten down your security settings and make it more difficult to identify and track you across the internet.
Does this come at a high cost of convenience? Absolutely. Most of my security settings break websites by default since I restrict all 3rd party apps and JavaScript. It takes me a good couple minutes to play around and see what is causing the issue.
If I can’t figure out how read your site without handing over a bunch of access, I move to the 2nd or 3rd site that usually gives me what I want without changing any settings at all.
Understanding what is real is the first step to controlling what controls you
No, it helps you understand what it actually is so you can think of solutions based on information instead of fear.
Stop accepting ads in your life, ffs. What is it with people and steadfastly refusing to install an adblock? Are you stupid?
Sometimes it’s the TV, and then I blame Jesus for stalking.
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Je sus
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What’s a TV?
Its one of those boxes you use as a monitor for retro game consoles with analogue output
They either don’t know adblock exists or are listening to YouTubers like Linus, who claim that blocking ads on their videos is “stealing”
cmon, pretty sure Linus says that it is basically equivelent to piracy (and hes right) while also freely admitting his use of ublock and saying youre free to use it. Let’s not defame others by quoting them out of context.
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Linus Sebastian (the youtuber) didn’t invent Linux, Linus Torvalds did
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The more ubiquitous ad blockers are, the more incentive companies have to pour resources into the “problem”. I’m really not sure what the endgame is of calling out why every user doesn’t have ad blockers on. The more we push on it, the harder it is to block ads. Honestly, in 2023 if someone allows ads in their spaces, let them. But I’d rather continue with what we have than push all users to something. I say this as a sports fan who knows all too well what happens to streams once they get too popular. I’ve gone through countless quality streamers that haven’t survived once word of mouth got out. Ad blocking will go the same way if it grows in popularity
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I don’t care. I’m not worried about it. It’s not that important. I’m not refusing, I’m just not giving two fucks about it. Why are you so militant about people doing the same thing as you do?
This does not come across the way you think it does.
So the OP calls me stupid? Yeah, I’m stupid for not needing to block ads. Fuck off.
Fuck off.
no u
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You guys get ads?
mobile phones man
Use a dns blocker (like nextdns) for systemwide ad blocking meaning it blocks mobile ads too. I haven’t had an ad in ages.
Edit: Or use something like adaway if you’re on android.
I tried to use adaway but I can’t do root and I already use a VPN. 😭 Thankfully I use NewPipe x Sponsorblock and ublock origin in Firefox so I’m usually covered.
I’ve got ublock origin in firefox on my phone. Pihole also helps. So I ask again: you guys get ads?
Sometimes things open in-app and use Google to load the page, so even if I select “open in firefox” after, there’s still an ad. Plus ads in apps in general.
Don’t use whatever serves you ads, simple as that.
Brave browser app. Get it, thank me later.
Or simply firefox
Really excited for desktop extensions on mobile
Downvoters don’t know Brave is the best thing for iOS users.
Ya see, Android fellows, Apple forces everyone onto webkit in iOS, and iOS Firefox can’t use extensions.
Brave has its blocker built in.
Can I get it on F-Droid or is it only on Google Play?
Just go for Mull + uBlock Origin.
what about Firefox and Ublock?
That works too, but mull is more private. It’s configurations are what we call “hardened”.
You can get the FFUpdater app from F-Droid, then use that to install Brave to your phone. But at that point, you may as well just use FFUpdater to install the much better alternative, Firefox, which doesn’t indirectly support Chromium engine dominance and doesn’t have that weird crypto crap Brave has.
Edit: Someone else replied to you suggesting Mull, which is also downloadable through the FFUpdater app.
Currently using Firefox and Ublock origin on mobile now that they brought extensions over
ublock origin on firefox mobile has been a thing for years. same for decentraleyes and darkreader. the recent change affects other extensions.
What I thought was that Mobile had it’s own built-in adblocking. I specifically remember being able to add the extension in a way I wasn’t able to a few months ago recently.
Given all my adblockers, getting ads at all is what scares me
Yesterday my ublock failed me and I had to watch a full 5 seconds of ads for 3 times! Fortunately it seems to work after updating filters now
See, that right there is true horror.
Yeah, Idk why but ublock auto-nuked the filters I entered (that nice custom filter from Tumblr), i didn’t notice but I did after the satanic torture by yt (15 secs of ads I won’t get back) I fortunately went on the dashboard and noticed my filters weren’t there, immediately re-pasted them.
Wait, did we go from being freaked out that our devices might be passively recording our speech to accepting it as the “good and normal” version of things? Cause I’m pretty alarmed at both.
I was going to say this! Just goes to show how dangerously effective mass conditioning by unscrupulous corporations is!
Hell, a lot of people think that caring about data privacy and -security AT ALL is for losers unless naked pics are involved 🤦
bUtItSfOrThEcHiLdRen!!11!1!
dOyOuHaVeSoMeThInGtOhIdE?11??!?1?
My favorite counterargument is asking these idiots if they close the toilet door. Because if they don’t want people to watch them shit, then they probably are hiding some suspicious stuff.
Yeah, it’s obvios they have something to hide if they want to close the door. They should make everyone see how they shit for the sake of our children
Butts for children?!
I thought they closed that place down!
It says but it’s (the big i can be very irretating)
It was a reference:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/BOKaqBfhcIE?si=jwojj7JvFgu-l0Zc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I get so frustrated when people find it extremely weird that I care about my privacy at all and haven’t accepted that I’m under surveillance 24/7. I know I can’t achieve full privacy, but why is a little more privacy a bad thing and why do they take it so damn personally, without even telling them to do the same. There are so many people who are cucks for corporations, silently accepting every new violation of their rights as if they have no alternative.
They just don’t know what is on the line. They still believe the only things those corporations are gathering are the stuff we post online ourselves.
Or they blatantly don’t care. Siting arguments like “I don’t have anything to hide”, which irks me to no end.
“You sure you have nothing to hide Denise? Do you also leave the door open when you go to a public toilet, Denise? I thought you had nothing to hide, Denise?”
Your devices recording you is something that doesn’t happen.
That requires a lot of bandwidth, or a lot of battery and a little bandwidth. There’s no evidence of that happening.
Honestly, the creepier thing is that they don’t have to to get creepily accurate ads.
Geolocation data means they know who you spend time with. They also know their search history. They know your interests. They can look at what people who seem similar to you search for.
Plus, they serve you a lot of ads so they can afford to have a lot of misses.
Your devices recording you is something that doesn’t happen.
There’s no evidence of that happening.
What’s your basis for this claim? I mean that might be the case, but is there some reason you’re able to have so much certainty?
I understand the “bandwidth” argument, and the “they don’t even need that” argument (I make a similar case in a comment to another reply), but neither of those support the idea that it can’t be happening.
Getting around the bandwidth problem isn’t that crazy: Low bitrate encodings (cause the audio doesn’t need to be human-comprehensible) and edge compute (i.e. doing some work on the device before sending anything) could mitigate this significantly, so it’s hardly impossible.
I think we mostly agree, I just wouldn’t apply that degree of certainty. But if you’re really confident that it’s definitely not happening because it’s definitely not possible, maybe you know something I don’t?
I guarantee you could do it all on-device with only a few KB upload per day.
Use a poor quality but fast text to speech algo, and use a bloom filter to track ad keyword hits and upload it periodically. It’ll use very little battery or data. If you’re wrong, the users don’t click and your online ad server explores other keywords.
I don’t think they need to do this though.
Personal story time. A few years back, I texted (through Whatsapp) a colleague for a few minutes about a friend taking up welding as a supplementary source of income, and immediately (within the day) received a targeted ad in the Duolingo app for… welding torches. Important facts, I don’t weld, I’ve never done any welding and I don’t know anything about welding. How this bit of info got from whatsapp to whomever was providing interstitial ads in the duolingo app, I have no idea. My best guess is still that google’s keyboard app is logging every single keystroke I type and aggregating it in a database somewhere. I can’t fathom how that shit isn’t extremely illegal.
Instead of recording and sending to servers, the tracker could use some speech to text locally amd send transcription to the servers too
Right - that would require enough battery and processing power to make it obvious that it’s doing something like that.
How much battery are “ok Google” and “hey Siri” using?
I don’t think so. Text to speech and speech to text engines are availiable locally without much power i guess. Also there could be error prone algorithm which records low quality audio for sake of performance and extended battery which is still enough. Also its not far off from recording and sending low quality audio to servers as intermet speeds are much faster than an audio stream
They are available locally yes, but not without much power and processing.
So much power and processing usage, you would notice.
especially as it doesn’t even happen.
“oh yeah well how come I was talking about something mundane, common and extremely popular and then but 4 days later saw an ad for it?!?!?”
big mystery indeed
You’re getting some downvotes, but yes, lol. I mean I’m not sure there’s never any surreptitious hot mic eavesdropping going on, but people definitely often assume so when there’s a more parsimonious explanation, e.g.:
Most peoples’ ads are targeted based on more mundane technology, and they see hundreds of ads per day, so if even 1% of their ads overlap with something that they were just talking about, they’ll still be fairly likely to see a spooky “I was just talking about that!” ad relatively frequently. Not to mention that they’re likely to be thinking about a thing because their platforms are also proactively marketing that thing to them. Just pareidolia, no eavesdropping necessary.
Doesn’t mean eavesdropping isn’t happening-- Just means it doesn’t need to be happening for that effect to occur.
I’m in marketing, I subscribe all all marketing new sources, I run a martech stack of a bunch of different channels: paid 3rd party syndication, search intent, ecosystem intent, technographics, firmographics, psychegraphics, funding round research, paid and organic social, paid and organic SEO, display, video, in app placements, new hiring intent… none of these platforms offer me “conversational intent”
so it’s only usage would be if
a) you are already cooked (or server side ID’d) b) your conversation procs a buying intent signal for an affinity cluster c) they secretly inject that signal into the data and obfuscate its source
well, now you just have worse data that’s also illegal. So what’s the motivation?
It is rarely some coincidence and has more to do with extrapolating data.
If you talk with a friend about getting a pet, your phone and by extension the ad company that receives your location data, knows you 2 saw each other.
If that other person searched for pet food, then you will also receive ads for pet food even though you “only talked about it”.
Other example, you post you have a new job on Facebook (which a lot of people do). Facebook knows where you live because of location data, and they know where the company is located since it is public data. So they know how close those 2 are. If Facebook then looks through your photos and notices none of them have a picture of a bike in the last 5 years. Then you are likely to buy a bike in order to go to work. Thus you get ads for bikes.
Imagine getting ads in 2023.
uBlock Origin and uMatrix chads rise up
Also revanced/piped.video, sponsorblock, spotX … probably more
Firefox mobile gang.
Chrome has ads on ads on ads these days, it’s terrible.
We looked into it more deeply and found that apparently what happened is users started blocking ads through the chromium browser extension APIs, so we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.
Signed: the Google manifest team
Shit. Add modded Spotify and YouTube to the list. If it can be blocked I’ma do it.
Can’t you do all the script blocking from uMatrix in uBlock Origin?
umatrix?
You get ads:
💀💀💀
I genuinely feel bad for the people who actually get ads online these days.
On desktop, Firefox + ublock origin is my goto.
On Mobile, the best I can really do is Youtube revanced and PiHole, but that doesn’t cover everything, and often breaks other functionality.
Why not Firefox + ublock-origin on mobile?
iPhone user 😂
No ads
Fuck, forgot to seal the kilograms of coke in my luggage.
Drugs: tricking Americans into conditional use of a sane system since the 60s!
The real reason drugs are illegal: they need to figure out new methods for secret agencies to smuggle items.
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What are ads?
-pihole / uBlock / Brave browser user
Maybe addons, idk?
-adguard home / ublock / Mull browser user
did they mean ‘apps’? sounds kinda similar
-realizing that the reason we still have this broken economic system on the internet is because of fuckers like this guy^^^^
you get ads
no i dont
I haven’t seen ads in years lol. I’m very aggressively adblocked on every layer possible. Even down to setting my router to use an adblocker dns as a final protection layer.
Don’t worry, those big platforms can’t read your thoughts. Those ads aren’t there because you thought of those things.
Because it’s the other way around. They want you to buy the stuff they have ads for so they manipulate you into thinking about those things first.
So they have read AND write access to your thoughts.
it is genuinely possible op saw an ad, then they thought about it but forgot about the ad, then saw the ad again and frequency bias kicked in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
The largest field for people with psychology or sociology degrees is advertising. They know how people think, how societies think, and are getting better at influencing both every day.
I’ve been doubting my sexuality lately and I freaked out when Google recommended an ad with LGBT couple on it. Not even my friends or family know that side of me.
Oh, it’s been proven Google and corporate social medias (and Walmart?!?) can figure out that stuff before you do.
you’re thinking of target, specifically telling dad that daughter is pregnant. its this store thats identical to walmart and sells the same stuff from the same sweatshops, but its kept slightly cleaner and so middle class people who want to feel better than the poors who shop at walmart shop there, but its basically the same store with a 20-30% markup.
Sometimes avoiding the Walmartians feels worth the markup
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Yes, that’s the story I was thinking of.
I’m going to push back against everyone saying that the algorithm knows. While not unthinkable, I believe it is much more likely that it is a coincidence, and what you’re experiencing is called the frequency illusion. Simply because your sexuality has been on your mind lately, you’re more likely to notice things that remind you of it - not because those things are more prevalent but simply because you, subconsciously, pay more attention to them.
That said, privacy is important and you should definitely try to maintain it - e.g. use a private browser window in a fresh browser instance to research things related to sexuality.
It’s hard to believe anyone missed this:
This article is from 2012
I wouldn’t underestimate it. I also wouldn’t buy into the “I have nothing to hide” narrative. It’s not about hiding or not hiding. The fallout from the Dobbs decision is a great example of why, if you aren’t concerned with privacy now, then you will be in the future. All of a sudden, the right of 51% of the population to make decisions about their own bodies was suddenly gone, and handed over to state governments. The day before that decision, people needing abortions and the doctors who provide them had “nothing to hide.” The day after? They’re suddenly criminals. Their social media can be monitored. Their online and in-person purchases. Where they travel and why. Their medical records. And maybe worst of all, their fellow Americans are offered prize money if they turn someone in so that they can be charged in criminal court.
Or what about Florida’s “risk prediction” software that supposedly can predict which “at-risk” (aka non-white) kids will become criminals? Maybe I’m wrong for finding that unsettling. This is from 2015
https://theweek.com/articles/495147/floridas-minority-report-crime-prediction-software
What about social credit scores? Which we already have, we just don’t get to see them (LexisNexis “risk solution” software). But sooner rather than later, every word and action will be recorded and held against us in every aspect of our lives, rather than just when applying for jobs and mortgages. And anti-discrimination laws don’t do shit. They always find a work around. Although with the current supreme court I’m sure all forms of discrimination will be perfectly legal soon enough.
Btw private browsing doesn’t prevent tracking. It just doesn’t store anything in the broswer history.
Even using a VPN only protects you from your ISP.
If you’ve got Gmail or Google location services or FB installed, or an app running their SDKs in the background, your VPN IP address can be linked back to your device.
Privacy is really hard in 2023.
Yeah, the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is fascinating and something that I experience constantly. I would be surprised if that’s not what’s going on here. I’ve never experienced it for something as personal and important as doubting my sexuality though, that must be jarring as hell.
I can understand being freaked out by that for sure. Think of it like this, you might like similar artists and articles that LGBT folks like. Maybe you click on more links on stories that affect LGBT folks. But also, lots of ads have LGBT couples nowadays, it’s what gets the red hats so upset. Either way, it’s nothing to be ashamed or worried about, and there’s at least a chance that you took something to be more deeply targeted at you than it really was. Chin up there, yeah?
What really upset me though was the privacy aspect of it. Imagine your friend wants to show you a meme or something, and you suddenly see an ad with an LGBT couple on it on his/her phone. If that was me I would immediately think they’re being targeted with that ad for a reason. And like, I don’t have a problem being part of the LGBT community, but this thing could out me to everyone without me being ready you know? What if I want to play a YouTube video for my family and I get a targeted recommendation? That would be a problem for me.
I do totally understand that, and that must’ve been jarring and anxiety inducing. What I was trying to convey is that straight folks get those ads too but I don’t meant to downplay the emotional disturbance of it all whatsoever, just help ease your mind now.
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You get ads about things you have photographed. If you give Facebook image access, it will scan ALL of your photos locally. I had some photos of couches it started giving me ads for them.
Oh that explains the penis enlargement pills…
Lmao
Gotta protect those nudes.
