Adverts whilst browsing the net

[milu]

All you boffins
My business partner looks up items on eBay (tyres,with specific details) on smartphone,not at my house or my wifi.
Later I'm at home on my iPad and the advert banners coming up are for the exact items!
So who's watching then? How does this stuff get linked? Are there no secrets lol?

[CrutyRammers]

Who's watching? Everyone.
You'll be in each other's contacts, which if you use WhatsApp for example will have been slurped. You'll presumably be in the same location for work, maybe on the same network. If you're on google, facebook, linkedin or any of those they'll match up contacts, friends, emails etc.
Clever innit?

[milu]

More like scary!

[joshleb]

My missus was looking at shoes on Clarks yesterday on her phone, last night when on my laptop the shoes she was looking at popped up on the side of facebook...

[GIYess]

To add to this on three occasions so far (that I've noticed) We have been discussing something at length in the office. I unlock my phone and go on the internet and what comes up? The exact thing we were discussing. These are things I've never searched for before. (pensions) I've googled and Samsung deny the phones listen but lots of others have noticed it online.

Very Strange.

[K50 DEL]

I do wonder how much business companies actually get from adverts on the Net.... I'm definitely a very heavy Internet user and have been since the turn of the Millennium yet I have never clicked an advert and I generally don't even read them.

PH isn't too bad, some of the sites I've used the adverts / pop ups are so intrusive that I simply close the page and browse elsewhere.

[milu]

Just mentioned this to said partner. She just informed me that I was looking at cycles yesterday. Correct!!
Flipping eck...... I’m going off grid lol

[designforlife]

get firefox and install the adblockplus free add-on.

Goodbye ads!

[TwigtheWonderkid]

Anyone else get adverts having never looked anything up, but merely talking about stuff with Amazon Echo/Dot in the room? Now that's scary, which is why I won't have one.

[4x4Tyke]

milu said:

All you boffins
My business partner looks up items on eBay (tyres,with specific details) on smartphone,not at my house or my wifi.
Later I'm at home on my iPad and the advert banners coming up are for the exact items!
So who's watching then? How does this stuff get linked? Are there no secrets lol?

All the big internet companies, Google, AWS (Amazon), eBay, Twitter, etc...

They all offer tools and affiliations to websites/content publishers that mean you are tracked on essentially any website you visit. There are a few privacy holdouts but they are few and far between.

Take Google Analytics as one example. The others all do much the same sort of thing. GA provides a piece of code to web site publishers that goes on their web pages. Including the page you are looking at now (right click -> view source) and you will see references to Google.

Google see every page you visit, the time you visit, the site address, where you came from (IP address), subject of the page etc. Each time you visit a web page with Analytics you leaking a little more information about yourself. Before long, all your IP addresses are linked, you are linked to family, friends and colleagues who use the same internet connection. At some point you leaked your email and other personal details like name, dob, address, details of companies you have accounts with.

This is on top of the things you openly tell them you are interested by typing it into their search engine.

That only scratches the surface, the reality is orders of magnitude more insidious, it is hidden and hideously complex to the extent that even Google really do not know, what they know, about you. This will only become even more opaque as knowledge engines become ubiquitous.

Edited by 4x4Tyke on Monday 16th October 12:23

[Harry H]