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ICE is using Palantir data to target neighborhoods, which is purchased directly from “advertising” data brokers. So “advertising” is only part of the story. It’s always been about creating a surveillance state, it’s just not evenly distributed.
I don’t think the websites all started thinking “I’ll harvest data for the inevitable surveillance state”
Google actually started with great intentions and hoped to translate the data into revenue via “normal” ads
But… Dogy ass holes paid better than ads, and, like most companies, whenever they get successful/big enough, everything goes out the window in favour of profits
“Knowledge is power” is an expression at least hundreds of years old. Whether these data collectors were specifically thinking of adverts or not, they realised that this information had value, and so they collected it. I don’t think we can know the true motivations of the data collectors and brokers, but we can know that there is (and always has been) a market for data.
Yeah exactly. Ultimately they became money machines, and they only exist to make more money now… Some will have willfully amoral motivations (Cambridge analytica, palantir) and others will just persue more money, regardless of the outcome of his they do it, I.E implicily amoral.
A targeted ad consists of showing you what you just bought from the same exact website you just got it from.
Like, it’s just a scam towards the businesses at this point and a waste of my time and bandwidth.
Amazon: I see you just bought one coat rack; would you like to start your coat rack collection with these other coat racks?
Username fits
Facebook is the same : “Oh I see you’re married! Do you want to befriend other hot women? Let us introduce you!”
It’s absolutely working. About 50% of the population is susceptible to these ads
I find it so funny how I use Spotify daily*, and the account is linked** to my google account that I use a lot, and in the past I made sure to downvote any ads that don’t fit my interests at all, so basically giving as much aminition to give some good targeted ads to me.
Turns out, after all that, I get rubbish collection ads, face mask ads and wastewater management ads, even though I have truly never thought about any of those nor have shown interest in them, AND I’ve shown tons of interest in only technology.
Asterisks
(*) - I use the iOS mobile app, so I can’t really block ads unfortunately, even though I’d love to :/
(**) - I made the google and Spotify accounts when I was in my early teens, so I didn’t really know or care about digital footprint or tracking, so if I was able to go back, I would’ve at the very least gotten multiple google accounts to sandbox my activities. But hey, better late than never I guess!
At one point, the advertising algorithm for Tinder decided what I needed in my life was a tractor. A massive, eleven tonne tractor intended for work on a large farm.
It probably wouldn’t fit up my driveway.
I have a similar account for everything that I expect to have some form of tracking. Yet all of these services that are supposed to spy on me to find out exactly what I’m interested in have not once succeeded in targeted me with advertising for something I have any interest in getting. I’ve only seen them work for people who have Facebook or something that actively listens for things to make ads about, which I don’t have.
Why do so many advertisers think I own a dog? We have like a private, digital panopticon and they still serve me ads for dogfood for dogs I don’t don’t have.
I have to use facebook for work every few months. All sandboxed and shit. They seem to think I’m in the market for conceal carry yoga pants. Which I fine with, because that means they have no clue about my gender, hobbies, or political alignment.
I used to have a chrome extension that basically poisoned my data by clicking on every ad in the background while hiding the ads from me. I forgot what it was called. I don’t use Chrome anymore.
It also benefitted the websites I visited by improving their click-thru while also hurting the advertisers by costing them money for ads that would never be effective.
sounds like adnauseam. https://adnauseam.io/
i think advertising purposes are just a front. They use it for something, but ads is just an afterthought/excuse for public.
I mean microtargetting the ads would mean they’d get less ad revenue. I think the big ones are
A) they use the data to evaluate markets and target new markets.
B) they sell it to police/intelligence agencies to fluff up their sales with bigger data numbers even though some of the data is “likes popcorn” and “bought a spoon off amazon”
C) corporate espionage type stuff, you collect info on a lot of people but then ID your main competitors or detractors to read their chat logs.
They were the seed that started the surveillance machine, but you’re completely right nowadays the real ““value”” is elsewhere
And don’t forget to use cash, all those credit cards and payment apps are there to spy on you.
The oligarchs are benefiting from this system because they’re being open about creating a police state with a dictator and a fuedal system
I mean, the rich are benefiting from all the ad spending which is all that matters! /s
People really need to remember that you’re paying for the ads regardless of if you see them. The only people who lose out are those who show the ads and giving the amount of websites these days that are solely built around showing ads, I really have no sympathy for them.
The bigger question no-one seems to ask is, how much cheaper would products be if they weren’t spending trillions on ads in the first place?
Depends on the product, a lot of things exist to be ad bate, and don’t really serve a wider purpose. Tshirts is an example that comes to mind where people just buy dozens of designs they never wear.
The whole premise has become shopping is the fun activity, the product is just the waste from that activity that needs to be discarded.
So I guess sans ads we would see a lot less arbitrary products (and places like Amazon would take a hit [yay])
I would be curious to know how e-commerce would change though as without ads people would likely gravitate to the big box stores
I think it was proctor gamble that zeroed out their $200 million yearly adtech spend and saw zero impact to their sales from it. There’s a good possibility we’re making everything terrible just so that Zuckerberg and friends can keep getting richer to nobody else’s actual benefit.
Yeah, I dare say there’s companies that benefit from it, but P&G is one of those companies that exist purely on creatures of habit buying the same big branded boxes every month, because they haven’t fallen quite far enough in life to consider supermarket-brand products.
In much the same way as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, no clueless husband ever got told off for bringing home P&G branded fanny pads.
I lived in a country where people don’t speak English. There’s a sizable expat community of English speaking workers there. The ad targeting was so useless that I was constantly shown ads in a language I couldn’t understand. This was on an Android phone where everything was set to English. With every single interaction I with any app or web page I was broadcasting the language I know, and yet they couldn’t figure even that absolutely critical detail out.
This targeting was so bad that an old fashioned newspaper ad printed in ink next to a story would have been more effective. At least a publisher is going to put English ads in an English newspaper, German ads in a German newspaper, etc.
If the ad companies can’t even figure out the language(s) that their targets understand, their knowledge of their target must be essentially zero.
If the ad companies can’t even figure out the language(s) that their targets understand, their knowledge of their target must be essentially zero.
Sorry but this is the wrong takeaway here. They are so incredibly good at segmenting and profiling their audiences, they just don’t really give a fuck about serving good ads (or any other service for that matter) anymore. Cambridge Analytica anyone?
when i used apps with targeted ads, amongst generic type of stuff i also used to get two polar opposites of ads:
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ah, we see you’re in poland and use english a lot, want to learn english?
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ah, we see you’re in poland and use english a lot, we can help you get your immigration papers for legal employment
both at the same time btw. apparently being a polish national who speaks english fluently marked me as some sort of ad-anomaly
the ads also believed that i was a senior? at some point i even got a spam call inviting me to join a study on back pain T–T like bro you’re at least 10 years early, relax
Was ad number 2 about how to get immigration papers as an English-speaking person in Poland? I imagine Poland doesn’t have a lot of immigration from people in English-speaking countries. Especially not from people who haven’t figure out all the legalities necessary to gain employment in Poland.
i mean, the ad was in english so kinda? i never clicked on them so i can’t say for sure
though don’t forget that a person who speaks english doesn’t have to be from an english speaking country. most people who want to travel/live abroad will know at least some english
Good point.
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Everyone likes to think the ads don’t work.
The ads absolutely work.
They work on you as well.
Ads in general, sure. They work wonders, even on people who consider themselves immune to advertisement.
The post is about targeted ads, however. Do they really offer any substantial advantage? Let alone one worth all the data harvesting? Probably not.
The problem is targeted ads allow for really good data reporting. It’s really easy to show your ad dollars went to x million views with 98% of the audience in at least one of your demographics, and you had a Y% click through rate and a Z% conversion rate. This can make it look like it’s really effective, but it’s hard to say that it wasn’t some other advertising that got them there and the targeted spend was wasted.
Advertisers know a lot of their spending is wasted, but knowing which parts are actually a waste is pretty difficult.
People: Ads don’t work
Also people: Everyone knows what Raid Shadow Legends is
I know what it is, but I cringe at ads and am reluctant to buy anything that has been advertized to me
(Although this is nowhere near the behaviour of the average person, allegedly autism makes ads less effective because we are rational)
I should make a formal “The List” of products not to buy and put advertizers who get past my adblocking there
And yet I don’t know a single person who has ever played it.
Advertising works great when you have a good product and just need people to know it exists.
You got downvoted by the single person who actually plays Raid: Shadow Legends™.
I mean I think it is a game … Maybe? Something on mobile?
To be fair if a friend said “dude check this game called raid shadow legends” I would download it.
Not anymore. Intrusive ads made me automaticaly negative to the game. I would need at least 3 friends to say that now.
Hell I noticed I was reluctant to buy a pest spray recently because its brand was called “raid.”
Ah fuck I actually don’t have an argument for this one I’ve heard friends and family quote that shit
I’m still curious what kinda scam that perpetually-screaming-dude-in-armor ads are pushing. I don’t even know what the title of the game is, but that annoying shit must work on a lot of people I guess.
The person in the image also is overestimating how many people use adblockers. Most people i know watch youtube on their cellphones or tvs infested with ads.
infested with ads
yes: ads are the online equivalent of roaches
Other people: not using adblockers
Me: “How can you live like this?? To me this is an unacceptable standard of living”
Really? You mean the ads I’m shown in a language that I don’t speak work on me? How is that? Do they emit mind-control rays or something?
Ads aren’t just verbal, they are also visual. A “strong brand” would be instantly recognizable even if you don’t know the language at all.
E.g. you probably almost immediately know what this is, without even knowing the alphabet:
That’s kind of the point, advertisements are intentionally designed as brain worms which interact with deep parts of your brain and get you to instinctively associate them with something (ideally positive, but even general awareness is beneficial to the brand).
I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I say that I had no idea what the ads I was seeing were supposed to be about.
I work in this space and I’m appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.
Every smart person I know is using adblocking too. So is there’s like a percentage of people who eats ads all day and open their wallets up?
I was at Costco with my roommate this last weekend looking at coffee. They went straight for one saying they liked the design on the packaging. I asked if they were going to buy coffee based solely on how the packaging looks. They said “Yeah, that’s how advertising works.”
We’re on a decentralized message board that praises Linux and Self Hosting. We’re not the target market for this stuff. My mother-in-law? She buys every damn Alibaba drop shipped trinket that promises whatever from a Facebook ad. My wife is constantly suckered into stuff advertised on Instagram.
Yes, most people. Adblockers are used by a minority.
I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t have multiple friends who I have recently noticed don’t have ad blockers. Absolutely feral behavior and they were properly shamed for it.
An unfortunate truth.
Some people justify it by stating that they keep ads because they want to support the websites, but don’t know that at the very least they should be blocking trackers and 3rd party cookies
Even then the proper way to do that would be to Adblock and then whitelist sites you support and know don’t have turbo intrusive ads
I swear to god some sites are so filled with ads you can’t even buy things from them.
Yeah that’s what I do, but if they don’t know about adblock, they’re not gonna know about that.
Same thing on every other creative platform. People don’t know that it’s much better off for the creators to receive support in buying merch or patreon than it is for them to get a small fraction of what YouTube makes in ad revenue
they want to support the websites
Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?
Someone on here some weeks ago had a beef with me saying I skip passed promo content in YouTube videos. They said something about wanting to support the videomakers. K, but if I’m not in the market for a new mattress (as an example of an ad I sometimes hear), it doesn’t make sense for me to listen to the sponsored mattress read-through. If I don’t make a purchase with the YouTuber’s promo code, then what’s the difference if I skip a couple minutes ahead? Do I owe a video “respect” by listening anyway? And if for some reason the advertiser cares more about me listening to their spiel than about me actually making a purchase, well, that’s silly and sucks for them.
There are some things advertised that I’m never going to buy no matter how much they’re shown to me. Meal kits, gambling sites, men’s boxers, these are all things I’ve seen countless sponsored ad placements mid-video for, and they are all things I don’t use and can’t see myself using. Yet the ads persist.
So I will continue skipping.
Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?
For the most part, no, it doesn’t support the site, since most Google ads are PPC (Pay-Per-Click).
Sure but the metrics that companies produce after running an ad campaign to see if it was effective do not depend on those pay per click metrics. They will generally look at what the total sales or total amount of engagement with their content was pre and post the marketing campaign. If the number goes up they call it a success and will pay for another ad campaign. I guess the real question is are ad payouts for sites hosting them still generally based on pay per click or other engagement analytics that run after the campaigns are finished. That I am unsure of
It’s not actually most. It’s just enough to cover the ad spend.
Someone needs to create malware that installs ad blockers. That will more than half their conversion rate.
Most people access ‘the web’ via phone apps. There’s no adblocker for those.
There’s plenty, with a bit of doing. Definitely not as easy as installing ublock through a browser extension store but very doable
On iPhone? And on android without rooting?
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uBlock Origin Lite on Apple App Store (pretty new): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698
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uBlock Origin for Firefox on Android: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin/
I know about this and already have it on Firefox. I specifically mentioned phone apps. That means apps or games with ads.
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Yeah
Firefox on android can just install extensions. No clue about the iphone. I remember some chromium browsers also having extensions on Android but I’m not 100% sure which ones.
There’s also DNS blocking of ads which can be set in your DNS settings or be part of your VPN connection. This will effectively block all ads too (even embedded ones in apps). On android ofc, yet again no clue about apple.
On iOS it’s the same, extensions for browser or DNS for apps
Most people use apps or standard Chrome. And Google targeted the most popular adblocker there deprecating Manifest V2 and using only V3 by default (maybe V2 is already removed?)
Ads Georg, who lives in a cave and looks at adverts 17.7 billion times a day is an outlier and should not be counted.
Why? That seems like a pretty typical number for someone scrolling through Facebook without an ad blocker based on what I see from my family.
They absolutely are. Everything I got from my family this past Christmas was slop from the TikTok shop. They just clicked the first ad they saw and bought whatever. I even got two of the same item because my brother didn’t realize he clicked two ads for the same thing. I’ve been calling it Dropshipmas.
💀
“compliant consumer” is a mental illness
Oh shit I forgot all about this! After the holidays, everyone in the office was talking about all the garbage they got, and most of them were talking about how many sales/deals they got off of Tiktok.
Garbage in garbage out
How did you find out? Did you talk about it?
They were pretty happy to volunteer the info. He still gave me the duplicate!
I showed my sister ad block and she was like why would i want to block ads. She said she has her algo dialed in and the ads just show her products she probably wants to buy.
as i have commented on another thing:
💀
“compliant consumer” is a mental illness
Understand that we in the minority position here and the “compliant consumers” are intelligent humans making just as many choices and trade offs with different values, skills and priorities just as we are doing.
I think there is a solid argument to make for both sides since the issue is morally relative and only one side has a working solution. I could never support it but i can see why others do.
That hurts my brain to hear, oh my!
You think that’s an obscene amount of money? The intermediary services that collect, collate, aggregate, etc. that same data in the first place before selling it to companies like your employer? That’s where the insane money is. That’s the long game. 🤢🥲
Middlemen make the most money of any profession.
Market Makers. Insurance. Everyone involved in the mortgage world. Research publications. Mid-level managers.
I’m a mid-level manager. I do make a good amount of money.
Was about to comment similarly 🤪
There are enough stories about somebody installing a pi-hole and a family member getting angry because now the ads for all the pretty things are gone.
I’m going to push back on this. The experiments that had scientific rigor shown that broad ads were only marginally less effective then personalized ones while being way cheeper.
A lot of what you see may be attributing conversion to sales that would happen anyway. Classic examples would be do you use branded search keyowords? Off course you do, despite the body of evidence that it only cannibalize the organic search.
But there are other much more complex mehanics in play. Each sestem takes away more and more control to replace it with “autootymization”, so you truly have no idea to whom and when your ads is shown. Exact keywords are broader then broad “back in a day”. Who knows how google is mixing your ad components, an now AI will dynamically change the ad content and placement using unknown criteria. All this to obscure that what we do is advertisal (?) equivalent showing a pizza ad to people who finished giving their order to the waiter.
Measurable online was here to save us from ineffective offline. Big data was here to save us from innefectove CPC. Algorithms were here to save us from paralism of to much data and now AI is here to save us from all this producing mostly a negative ROI anyway.
I honestly belive we were in the middle of a massive online advertising bubble, that we manage to cover up with even bigger AI bubble.
We are fucked.
I work in this space and I’m appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.
And here is the hint (with the fencepost) that it might be more wishful thinking on the customers side (the companies renting the service). Similiar to the AI slop bubble.
It’s because advertising is the pretext for government surveillance
The ads companies hate the government too. They don’t want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.
There’s no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.
This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)
Ad/tech companies are toys of the government. Sometimes these toys throw a fit because the people involved want more money. But they were made by the government, and have a front story about how a genius with a good idea and business skills turned it into a billion dollar company. They wouldnt exist without the iniciative and investment of the government.
If they were “toys” of the government, they wouldn’t so easily be able to bend the government to their will. They were hardly “made by the government”.
The government is a complex system with internal conflicts.
I think “surveillance” doesnt cut it. Mass monitoring of political opinions, and subtle manipulation of these political opinions through recomendation algorithms in social media is whats being attempted here. “Surveillance” sounds so innocent in comparison.
But youre right, the advertisement business model is a front, a capitalist-flavoured mask, to make a state apparatus appear natural and somewhat acceptable to the people.
that’s right, those lucky strike ads in 50s mags? Government surveilance.
Okay nerd, modern advertising. Targeted advertising. Whatever you want to call it. The ad industry works on ways to learn everything about you and then contracts with the government to sell access to this data (or they are compelled, but often the former via data brokers). Snowden revealed this with prism and a number of other programs but it predated that and has been going on since
The “algorithms” are also dumb as fuck. For example on a large retailer site you spend a couple of hours browsing for a particular kind of item. You are comparing different kinds, looking up reviews and issues, watching YouTube videos about them. And finally you pull the trigger and but the thing. Then for the next 3 months that site (and others that picked up on the research) will go: Hey here are some more of that thing you like, you really liked it right? Would you like to compare some more items? Uhm no, I actually bought said thing, you made the sale. All of that “targeted” advertisement is just wasted, I have zero interest anymore since the need has been filled.
It’s either that or stuff I can’t afford (like memory or graphic cards) or really weird stuff I have no idea why it’s being shown to me. Sometimes very alarmingly so. Just recently I got an ad that said “Popular in your region” and it was for illegal Nazi dogwhistle flags, “self defense knifes”, baseball bats and tracksuits. That’s a bit scary. On the other hand the same site gave me an ad for an “easy to conceal” blowjob machine sex toy. Like holy shit what kind of people are living in my region?
Targeted ads have been terrible for as long as I can remember. I don’t think I ever bought anything through an ad or hardly ever even clicked on them. Only time I click on them is because the site and my adblocker are fighting and when I try to click somewhere on the page, it inserts an ad the last millisecond, shifts the entire page so I accidentally click on it.
Illegal nazi flags are “popular in your region” and bought together with weapons? Maybe tip the police off?
Idk how much action they can take on something like this, but it seems like something is going on that shouldn’t be.
Amazon thought I was a toilet seat collector for 3-6 months after I bought a 3-pack. No amount of not clicking on those promoted items could convince them otherwise.
It thought I was a transvestite for lime a year after a Christmas where I bought my my mom a sweater, and my girlfriend jewelery.
Like full on recommending me panties and lingerie in my mens size 32 waist.
FWIW, a good chunk of lingerie ads are meant to target men (assuming they’re heterosexual and in a relationship).
Sure, but they were showing them in my size, lol
Do they make them in size 38? Asking for a friend.
When that one embarrassing purchase from last year still haunts your algo…
I had to buy adult diapers for my elderly parents. Whoo boy did that unleash a storm.
well that’s the problem. people usually buy one
I bought a used school bus on eBay a few years ago (to turn into a skoolie) and since then I’ve been bombarded with ads for used school buses. I can assure anyone interested that one is more than enough. Yes, there are school districts and companies that maintain large fleets of school buses, but they do not buy them on fucking eBay.
One of the parts that gets me is there is a good opportunity for more sales there (if that should happen is another debate I don’t have the energy for). A few years ago I bought an electric kettle. So cue months of ads for electric kettles. It’s a kettle, you only need one. Now if I had been shown different teas or coffees, stuff I would use the kettle to make, they would have absolutely hooked me easily. I had a new toy, I was excited to use it, I would have loved trying new teas with it. I still did, but they were all ones I chose.
Yup! Bought an android phone on Amazon. I got a bunch of ads for phones or incompatible accessories. Amazon… You know I bought a android phone, why are you selling me a lightning cable? You know it was a pixel phone, why are you selling me a phone case for a Samsung s series phone?
I’ll piss off a bunch of lemmy users with this but… I don’t mind ads. I hate useless ads. As you said, ads about teas or coffees would of been useful for you. 99% of the time if I buy something I don’t need more of that, maybe some associated stuff but not that. If I buy a video card yesterday I don’t need another one. Sell me the latest games. Sell me da monitor with high fps/resolution to show off what the video card can do. I buy a clothes washer, I don’t need another one. Sell me detergent. Sell me fabric softener.
How have all the advertising companies missed this?
True. If I buy a fridge try selling me other kitchen appliances because I might be remodeling. Don’t try to sell me more fridges. This is ludicrous!
I still get recommended tampons because my ex-gf bought some with my Amazon account 5+ years ago. Peak recommendation brilliance.
can you imagine being a transman post hysterectomy?
FUCKING NO! I don’t use those anymore!
I always just assumed I was too weird to effectively algorithmicly advertise to. I’m far away from the average American by a lot of measures and my interests are very niche.
When I get suggestions or ads they feel like they are for someone else a lot (I like your blowjob machine example, many ads assume I’m male and lonely even though I’m a woman. Maybe that demographic is so lucrative and I’m so hard to sell to that I get those ads)
