Big brother is listening?

[Wacky Racer]

Last night my wife was talking to my son on the other side of the room about changing the filter in our small aquarium....

I was only half listening to the conversation as I was on my laptop doing other stuff and have no interest whatsoever in fish or fishtanks.

Tonight, I logged on to my favourite football team website and what should pop up but a banner advert for this particular manufacturer.s aquarium equipment.

I have never to my knowledge typed anything on any computer I have owned regarding fish or indoor fishtanks.

Scary!

[Mr E]

Or, your wife has searched for aquarium filters and the algorithm sees the same IP and serves the ad.

[Wacky Racer]

Mr E said:

Or, your wife has searched for aquarium filters and the algorithm sees the same IP and serves the ad.

I suppose that could make sense, although I know several people who won't have Amazon echoes and the like for the same reason.

[Error_404_Username_not_found]

Guessing you have a Smart TV?

[Wacky Racer]

Error_404_Username_not_found said:

Guessing you have a Smart TV?

No, but we have Amazon echo.

[e-honda]

Mr E said:

Or, your wife has searched for aquarium filters and the algorithm sees the same IP and serves the ad.

Most likely
Next most likely is it was triggered off of previous searches / purchases on a device you have a connection to, after a certain amount of time.
Eg a pack of these filters lasts about 3 months so they re targetted you when they thought you needed some. I've worked on systems that do exactly that.

[colin79666]

Just wait for your wife to see ads for things you have been searching for

[Wacky Racer]

colin79666 said:

Just wait for your wife to see ads for things you have been searching for

[xeny]

colin79666 said:

Just wait for your wife to see ads for things you have been searching for

I think that Google/FB deduce if two people are likely to be in a relationship and are cautious about cross advertising for obvious reasons.

[Inigo Montoya]

Every day, you talk to your wife and your son about a wide variety of things. 99.9% of the time you don't find anything remotely weird about this.

Occasionally you will talk about something that, by pure chance, crops up again in the next few days. You won't remember all the times when nothing surprising happens. You will remember the few coincidences, which makes them seem to happen more often than they really do.

This isn't a conspiracy. You are not having a psychic or supernatural incident. Your Alexa isn't spying on you and sending messages to your local football team. These aren't voices from the other side.

It's just the law of probability doing its thing. Coincidences happen. Frankly it would be more surprising if they didn't.

I used to go on another website where they were convinced that they all had psychic superpowers because of stuff like this,

[xeny]

Easy way to test I suppose is pick a topic/hobby to talk about and not search for, and see if you start seeing adverts for related goods?

[anonymous-user]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Funny I'm watching this on a 'Prime' channel
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/plotsummary?ref...

'The machine' is watching us

[Glade]

e-honda said:

Mr E said:

Or, your wife has searched for aquarium filters and the algorithm sees the same IP and serves the ad.

Most likely

Surely this... I have a friend who works for apple, and he was explaining how 'they' do this tracking, which was interesting. Very clever, and just because you don't search for something but they still can advertise to you. It seems like witchcraft and is common for people to think theybare being spied on. One of our other mates round the table started saying the same thing, and then trotted out the oft stated thing on PH that they don't fall for advertising etc.

The apple guy told us that apple have very strong anti-tracking policies and you can use their safari browser to prevent cross site tracking, and tell your phone not to allow apps to track you either.... apparently Facebook are not happy , because advertising targeted this way is their business model.

I'm tempted to get an apple phone just to stop being advertised things I'm not interested in (or already have) due to the algorithms, and get back to random adverts where I have to have them.

[LunarOne]

Glade said:

I'm tempted to get an apple phone just to stop being advertised things I'm not interested in (or already have) due to the algorithms, and get back to random adverts where I have to have them.

I'd rather not have advertising and would rather the internet ran on micropayments - 1p per article or whatever. But if I have to see ads, I'd much rather they were for things I'm not interested in. I'm pretty good at not spending money on things I have no interest in!

[CarCrazyDad]

Inigo Montoya said:

Every day, you talk to your wife and your son about a wide variety of things. 99.9% of the time you don't find anything remotely weird about this.

Occasionally you will talk about something that, by pure chance, crops up again in the next few days. You won't remember all the times when nothing surprising happens. You will remember the few coincidences, which makes them seem to happen more often than they really do.

This isn't a conspiracy. You are not having a psychic or supernatural incident. Your Alexa isn't spying on you and sending messages to your local football team. These aren't voices from the other side.

It's just the law of probability doing its thing. Coincidences happen. Frankly it would be more surprising if they didn't.

I used to go on another website where they were convinced that they all had psychic superpowers because of stuff like this,

I was talking with my Son over dinner one time

We ended up talking (briefly) about the meditative action of "Tapping"

I've never had to search for anything even remotely related to mental health in the past, and the chance of a co-incidental advert? 0


My phone was on the Table at the time

When I went onto my home PC the next day, I was getting adverts for "Tapping" while scrolling through Facebook

There is no doubt in my mind that your smartphone (or rather, apps like Instagram, Facebook etc) or home app devices are monitoring your Microphone or collecting data

I'm sure if you read the small print of your Google Hub or Alexa it will say something like some personal data is collected for targeted ad revenue, people think things like Facebook and Google are free out of the goodness of their hearts :-)

[xeny]

No chance your son had been searching about it? FB and google will have a pretty good idea of your relationship.

[juggsy]

They’ll be using a DMP or similar, it’s the price we pay for the plethora of ‘free’ internet services we use, but certainly isn’t witchcraft or your Alexa/phone spying on you:

https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/arti...

[Inigo Montoya]

CarCrazyDad said:

I was talking with my Son over dinner one time

We ended up talking (briefly) about the meditative action of "Tapping"

I've never had to search for anything even remotely related to mental health in the past, and the chance of a co-incidental advert? 0


My phone was on the Table at the time

When I went onto my home PC the next day, I was getting adverts for "Tapping" while scrolling through Facebook

There is no doubt in my mind that your smartphone (or rather, apps like Instagram, Facebook etc) or home app devices are monitoring your Microphone or collecting data

I'm sure if you read the small print of your Google Hub or Alexa it will say something like some personal data is collected for targeted ad revenue, people think things like Facebook and Google are free out of the goodness of their hearts :-)

Before the internet, people would get excited if they thought about Aunt Ethel one day and she phoned out of the blue the very next day. Forgetting all the times when they thought about someone and they didn't phone.

Or when they had a premonition that they should play the lottery and they won something ... forgetting all the times when they didn't win.

The human brain is good at seeing patterns when there's nothing there.

[Ham_and_Jam]

CarCrazyDad said:

I was talking with my Son over dinner one time

We ended up talking (briefly) about the meditative action of "Tapping"

I've never had to search for anything even remotely related to mental health in the past, and the chance of a co-incidental advert? 0


My phone was on the Table at the time

When I went onto my home PC the next day, I was getting adverts for "Tapping" while scrolling through Facebook

There is no doubt in my mind that your smartphone (or rather, apps like Instagram, Facebook etc) or home app devices are monitoring your Microphone or collecting data

I'm sure if you read the small print of your Google Hub or Alexa it will say something like some personal data is collected for targeted ad revenue, people think things like Facebook and Google are free out of the goodness of their hearts :-)

This has never happened to me or anyone in my circle of friends or family.

So either it doesn’t happen or they are not very good at it.

[CarCrazyDad]

xeny said:

No chance your son had been searching about it? FB and google will have a pretty good idea of your relationship.

He didn't. It's all very odd.