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Retargeting Ads Stalk You For Weeks After You Shop
eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on a new kind of web ad that takes products you were looking at purchasing on one site and continually advertising them in front of you at subsequent sites. After looking at shoes at Zappos, a mother in Montreal noticed the shoes followed her: 'For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes. It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it's a little creepy, especially if you don't know what's going on.' The spreading ploy is called 'retargeting ads' and really are just a good demonstration of how an old technology (all they use are leftover browser cookies) are truly invasive and privacy violating. Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer and one writer mentioned a consumer 'do not track' list — adding that retailers really show little fear of turning off customers with their invasion."
So... You look at something, decide you *don't* want to buy it... and then they continue to advertise it to you in case what? You change your mind?
????
Profit
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
I agree it's creepy, but Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer bothers me a bit. Really, I'm not at all sure that the government should be regulating in the internet at this picky level of detail.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If you just use adblock this isn't a problem ...
If I just bought something, why would they think I'm going to buy it again? If it was a perishable product or one that is periodically used up, that's understandable, but good shoes generally last at least a year or so.
That mother deserves a Zappos stalker. When done with a site LOG OUT. Flush cookies and cache (set limits on them). And stop being a sheep. In the end, it's a (relatively) free experience being online. If she's not happy and not responsible with it, go back to VHS tapes, you'll have far few worries.
I booked a ferry crossing from the UK to France through Brittany Ferries' website, and since then I've often been presented with adverts for Brittany Ferries. It is actually putting me off, and has made me install Adblock plus. I don't mind adverts: I know that they're needed to try and monetise this crazy thing. What I do object to is being stalked by an advert for something that I've already bought the product for! So, well done, that's me now out of the internet advertising audience. I suspect I'm not the only one who has been pushed over the edge by this...
The primary use (for the user) of cookies are session cookies. If it wasn't for session cookies, I would just disable them. Maybe you could add a "whitelist this site for cookies y/n?" query right after "do you want to save the password for this site"?
Emotions! In your brain!
So I look at a product, BUY it, then am constantly targeted with ads urging me to buy it.
WTF?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, some sites near and dear and it's really annoying when it's the stuff I BOUGHT. Because it's stupid.
Yeah, I'm more than a little tired of seeing Universal Studios ads since we already went on vacation and I'm not going to buy any more tickets anytime soon.
-l
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Disclaimer: I manage paid search campaigns for a living. This is really not that big a deal. At its basest level this checks whether you visited a given page (usually a conversion event) and shows you an ad based on that. Reality is people like them because they boost conversion rates majorly. And every provider just about uses them, including Google. Don't like? Adblock ftw.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I have found using Ghostery added on to FireFox has cut down on a lot of this sort of cross site tracking for me.
http://www.ghostery.com/
Wax on, wax off baby!
Cookie Monster is nice, but any ad place worth a clue is using Flash Shared Objects and not browser cookies, and Cookie Monster does nothing to remedy that.
Best way to fix? The BetterPrivacy add-on in Firefox. Set it to run every 2-3 minutes to clean out the Flash crap, and go from there. However, this is just playing cat and mouse, because other add-ons tend to save state too.
Ultimately, this is where the government will have to get involved. Our only other option is everyone running their Web browser in a virtual machine that rolls back all changes when closed. I'm sure more add-ons will be needed to browse content in the future, and each of those add-ons will have the ability to allow persistent storage of data.
I once bought an out-of-contract LG phone, whose screen broke a week after purchase. No, I didn't drop it. Neither AT&T nor LG would repair/replace it, so I went online and searched around and found that this model phone (the Neon) had a notoriously fragile screen, and that no one was able to get repairs for it, so I ended up chucking my useless $80 hunk of plastic in the trash.
After this twenty minutes of googling, I was plagued by LG Neon ads for weeks. Every third or fourth website I visited had an ad trying to sell me the very phone that broke on me. It made me more and more angry every time I saw it. Without the constant reminder of my wasted money, I may have eventually forgotten about it, but now I will never, ever purchase anything by LG again, and I tell people who are looking for a new phone to get something - anything - else.
.. and a much better one at that:
Let people pick specifically what they are interested in seeing adverts for. If you ARE going to see advertising whether you want or not, why not pick what you are interested in? Just don't masquerade it as a "survey", "we would like to get to know our visitors better". People HATE giving personal information of any kind to marketers, so if this was to succeed, the perceived usefulness would need to be big enough to overcome that, and it would need to be centralised. We are talking very clearly explained, one-off Google-scale implementation.
The idea feels offensive, but personally, I would be much happier to see adverts for computer games and gadgets than the present brain-exploding slimming pills adverts. Even if I have no intention of buying them, at least I can think 'oh, that is neat'. People would have no incentive to 'game the system' either.
This would make most forms of monitoring, tracking and gathering of personal information redundant.
I don't have children. All I tried to do was connect an Ebola outbreak to a daycare facility, and, now I'm being staked by some kid all across the internet.
It's easy to opt out from every network offering this sort of service:
http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
(just remember to go there each time you clear your cookies)
I've seen this before. A bit back, an IT recruiter contacted me about a position available with New Balance's E-Commerce division. I had never been to their site before, so I checked it out. I passed on the job, but ever since then, I see NB Web Express banner ads all over the place, and I don't ever remember seeing them in the past. As far as the cookies themselves go, it doesn't really bother me. If I want to go someplace truly anonymously, I know how to do so, but otherwise I don't really care of someone can see part of my browsing history. I've got a family member who is completely paranoid about the stuff, even though she doesn't even really understand what a cookie actually is (and I've tried explaining it numerous times).
1) It is quite a long story, for the Times, yet it doesn't mention that you can use things like disable cookies and ad blocker 2) if you have a subscription to the Times (I think it is requried to see the actual story) go on line and make a comment; tell people, specifically where they can go to learn about online privacy (to bad firefox has gotten worse in the privacy gui in every version since 2.0)
What I find exceedingly obnoxious is when I do purchase something and for weeks afterwards I'll get promotions for similar things, if not the same exact altogether.
I'm curious to know how effective this sort of thing actually is. All those people in the marketing department and consultants will desperately insist it works. But given my own experiences and observations it just creates information overload and the vast majority of people end up ignoring most of what they say. Unfortunately, the very people who do marketing are the ones also supplying the statistics on whether it has been effective or not. They're not going to furnish information that renders them inessential. So they only disclose what seems to work and make some rather absurd suppositions.
There's no such thing as too much advertising to these guys. Expect things to get even more invasive.
I've noticed that almost everywhere i keep seeing ads for McDonald's. They are on websites that i go to. They are on tv. They are on the radio. I think i heard one on Pandora. They are even printed on billboards on the interstate through nebraska when i drive through there. That's pretty creepy that they KNOW i'm coming through nebraska and manage to print a billboard just for me.
What i don't get is i don't even like McDonald's. I hardly ever go there, yet they keep showing me all these ads. weird.
Firefox with noscript and CsFire, and don't save cookies.
When even this fails, I contemplate running Portable Firefox and having it reload from a scratch image every time I start it up.
I don't know of any online retailers where you can shop without getting a cookie or two to handle your shopping cart and sundries--what they like to call your "overall shopping experience." I was appalled when Overstock.com began following me--seemingly everywhere. They showed up at local and national news sites, a couple of humor sites--enough to make me feel as though I was being tailed in some kind of poorly done spy movie. And they always showed particular, specific items I'd been looking at. Adblock didn't seem to make a difference. I was ticked enough that when they sent me a "survey," I told them off. That resulted in two e-mails and a phone call to my husband, whose credit card I used in making the small purchase I did make. The gist of the communications was that they really wanted me to think this was "normal" and that "all websites" do it. Cleaning out my cookies helped with the immediate persecution complex, and installing and browsing with Ghostery (ghostery.com) in tandem with Adblock in my Firefox seems to have eliminated the problem for any other sites that are doing it. The solution, of course, is just not to shop at places that offend you and to tell them why you're taking your business elsewhere.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
From the article:
I think it's even creepier when you do know what's "going on".
You are welcome on my lawn.
I get ads for stuff I already bought. And when I notice the price is lower, that makes it worse. I get ads for stuff I have no intention of buying. Just by doing a search of several items to do some comparison shopping, for weeks I get ads of the stuff I rated crap! Its like a big sign saying "Hey we're tracking your every move. !" Makes me want to search for guns, ammo and body bags! When the FBI & ATF show up I'll know Big Brother has officially arrived.
Sometimes but not usually it's the retailer who initiates the stalking.
If you look closely, you'll find most big online advertising companies are using a few, but very similar principles. Google, Yahoo: it's how they make money, however usually through a daughter company to hide the link. It's the traditional approach to targeted advertising.
What happens is that an ad which is delivered to your computer at a product or search page will have a javascript or an image embedded of 0x0 pixels by the ad server. They call these beacon pixels and they allow ads from the ad server to track you for a certain interest (i.e. beacon). Other times the retailer will embed beacon pixels on their product pages directly, but that is not a requirement.
It becomes evil when sites like Facebook get involved, here the idea is they can read your beacons and spread them to your friends on the basis that they might want to buy the product they saw you buy. Not to mention the opportunity to enrich the beacons with target demographics like sex, age, location, etc...
This type of advertising is done on the principle that people who buy something will often buy similar things, accessories, or at the least that their friends will.
It is of course very backwards but just like spam, those few people who actually buy after being prompted with these ads make it all worth while. (And that doesn't mean click on the link but buy something from that site/brand within a few days or weeks.)
Fortunately, AdBlock and similar options do a very good job of blocking that content. Unfortunately some ad revenue based companies have become smart enough to break their usability if the code sent by the ad tracking is missing. So sometimes you will need a "GreaseMonkey" to get around that but it can be done.
Since Firefox and Adblock (/ghostery) has been around i wonder why people still spent all the energy on adds. As long as you look, click, discuss, hate, love them they have the desired effect and the money flows. Just /ignore / block as Spam is here to stay.
If a site is too intrusive there are most likely 10-100 alternatives to visit. Rather spend my time on that.
Enjoy this not so intrusive /. website where we can even turn the spam off (hear hear! :)
Message from god, Please logoff, rebooting the Universe
But the alternative is being "haunted" with ads that are completely unrelated to anything you are interested in. Relevancy actually turns ads from an annoyance to being potentially useful.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
If you're that much of an emotional cripple that you think an advertisement relevant to your interests is so horrible, you probably have no business on this site, what with its strong slant toward freedom, libertarianism and repulsion toward govt. regulation.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
There's no need for the web browser to run in a VM; it suffices if the plugins do. Then all file accesses of the plugins would go through the browser interfaces, and therefore the browser would be able to centrally control permissions.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Surely someone must have patented this "business method" or the software used to enable it. Can't the Trolls do something "right" for a change, and come out with the lawsuits to stop this silly practice?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer and one writer mentioned a consumer 'do not track' list"
Somewhere I feel that people are blaming the wrong thing here. We shouldn't go to the government and ask for protection - we should use anonymization services or ask/force the web browser companies to help out making our browsing private. The simple fact that tracking is *possible* makes it *feasible* and *worthwile* in the Internet age, so what we really should be aiming for is making ourselves *impossible* to track.
That's the only way for privacy. It's not about trusting the government (which I don't) to solve the problem (again which I don't), the marketers will still do the same thing but just hide it better. Deal with it.
If the cookies are anonymous pointers to database data specific to user "SJHja67J723bawhWE," how is it privacy invasion again? Little confused here.
As far as the story goes, people who whine about cookies are idiots. However, the summary's grammar was atrocious. Trying to parse all the bad subject-verb agreement made my head hurt...
"[...] ploy is called [...] and [...] are [...] of [...] technology [...] are [...]."
"is and are"? Really? And technology is plural now? I really hope that the person who wrote this is ESL.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I don't want to sound like an argle-fargling old timer with an onion on my belt, but for christ's sake, since when is "new to a montreal mother" new for /. ? Ad retargetting has been around for YEARS.
Small advertisers in particular love it, because it makes them look huge: "Hey, wow, these guys advertise on CNN.com!" Yep, they do! Only for you at this particular moment in time, but they do.
Full disclosure: I work for a company that uses these types of ads.
We use Akamai to serve up these kinds of ads. Believe it or not, most internet traffic goes through Akamai at some point, so when they decide to cookie you, they can find you just about anywhere. From the advertiser's point of view, it makes sense. Only between 2% and 5% of visits result in sales. So, by hitting you with these ads, they're trying to get a second chance at that business.
But if the question whether is whether I'd rather see an ad for some random diet that doesn't work, or some other scam, or to see an ad for a website that I willingly chose to go to, I'll take the latter any day.
As for the particular case of that woman and the pair of shoes, I wouldn't advertise for a particular pair of shoes, but then again, being a shoe company, they may have a better insight into the shopping mind of a woman.
Just be glad that these ads are being served up based on some fact. The fact that you visited that site previously. I think that's better than them trying to build a profile of me based on sites I've visited, and then trying to sell me running gear or viagra.
~Aero2600
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
I buy computers on overstock.com very often...they have corporate small form factor desktops they are very stable and very cheap: ~ $150 for a P4 3.0 and come with a licensed copy of XP so it really is right for gifting PCs to kids and tech-illiterates in my life... I look at these PCs probably 4x a month to see if one is on deep clearance, but now I don't have to... since half the sites I go to, they conveniently show me the current price of the PCs I care about in the form of a personalized overstock banner.
I am a consumer whore, but man I really appreciate this kind of advertising: showing me relevant marketing information that I find useful, instead of randomized results based on content
And I don't just think it's products. The first time I noticed it was this spring. My wife and I had a long weekend in Boston, and for weeks afterwards I was receiving banner ads to buy Red Sox tickets (as a Yankees fan, ain't happening if they're not there). We didn't reserve the hotel room online, but we did do a lot of online tourism thanks to Google Maps StreetView. More recently, I was looking for a backup battery for my iPhone. An external portable charger that could top up the 'phone and then rechange itself either by wall socket or 12v in-car. My Google Desktop shows me I looked at TheNerds.net at a few, and I eventually bought the Griffin PowerJolt Reserve at Target. Every ad for TheNerds I've seen since has the PowerJolt on it. OK already, it's good, I just didn't buy it from you!
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
If I have ads shoved in my face all the time I don't buy that product.
try the Firefox CookieSafe AddOn
a while back I was up for a job with an online womens wear company Asos - I checked out there site to get a feel for what they did and for several weeks I got ads for high heels and leggings on slashdot which was a bit jaring the first time it happened.
Visit a site and get propositioned for months.
Excellent suggestion. I leave Firefox open for weeks at a time so deleting cookies when I close it doesn't do me much good.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
One of the cooler implementations of an app level VM system was Thinstall, now EMC ThinApp. With this, one could have on executable that would store all files and Registry entries changed in a subdirectory in the user's AppData/Thinstall directory. Thinstall could also be configured to wipe the directory when the app is closed.
The only disadvantage to this setup is if malware or a Web browser plugin could break out and run as the user's context not hemmed in by the encapsulation Thinstall had.
What would be cool is to combine redirected writes on the OS level with Thinstall's functionality. This way, the OS shunts any write requests it gets to the directory the app has in the user's home directory, both file changes and Registry entries. So the app can think it fat, dumb, and happy installing junk all across the system, when in reality there are only de-duplicated changes in its directory marking its work.
You already bought the shoes. Show me something else stupid.
I looked around online for shipping containers a few weeks ago, thinking a short one would make a great storage shed. They would, but the price is a bit more than I'm prepared to pay. I looked really, really hard.
Since then, I've been seeing container ads galore. In particular, I see ads from 'Buyer Zone', and they look like they are targeted at commercial buyers, which I am not, but they can't really tell the difference.
Cookies? Nope. I get these ads at work, where I NEVER looked for containers ever. Just at home. Not every on my work machine.
Why?
Google.
I use my iGoogle page at work as the personal front page to get what I want, even Slashdot RSS feeds. And the Buyer Zone pages come up on Google pages. I use iGoogle on my personal machine also.
I'm working on converting my personal web site to a Joomla site complete with RSS feeds, links, email, and such, hopefully a GMail connector, but if not I still use GMail as the front end to my own personal mail server, so I can just go there directly. And Calendar I hope, along with other stuff. Grrr....
Then I can pull another Google thorn from my side. And avoid the Google Ads that follow you no matter what.
And if you're certain that Google doesn't do this, that they also rely on cookies, please, set me straight. And use your Google account when I ask for a personal assurance, ok?
The Google Evilmeter is reaching Critical. How much longer before it's pinned in the red?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This has been going on for quite a while. Amazon has been doing it for years. If I browse for Ender's Game, sure enough, the next time I show up, there it is in a recommended section, and even in Amazon ads on other sites. (Creepy adds reading cookies).
:-)
Anyway, "I know about" a scenario when someone at the workplace left her Amazon account logged in at a computer that others use. Well, a mischievous person browsed all sorts of Amazon's seedier sides for anal beads, dildos, lesbian literature, etc and added a bunch of these items to a wish list. To this day, she is still getting perverted recommendations... Or so I am told.
(I only "know" about this situation, I'm sure it wasn't me.)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
I don't understand why this works. Why is the browser allowing a site to read another site's cookies? I can see giving cookies to another site in the same domain, but giving a cookie from, say, Facebook, to Amazon should definitely not be allowed. So if Firefox does this idiotic thing, do they give an option for disabling it?
64-bit firefox and adblock. No flash (there's no 64 bit flash) so I just use 32-bit opera when I WANT to see flash content. No ads on account of adblock.
So even if I'm being stalked, I don't know or care about it because the companies stalking me aren't getting any benefit from it.
I don't see any ads, ever on the internet. Yet one more compelling reason to use adblock.
There is one thing I forgot to add which should help things:
Change your outgoing IP often if you don't have servers running. That, or use a proxy server so more than just you are coming from that address. An additional benefit of an encrypted proxy server is that if one is using a dodgy AP, someone sniffing traffic wouldn't be able to discern what is being done over the wire for the most part.
Posting as AC here just because of this.
Webmasters: with a clever combination of url munging and (basic, preferrable digest) authentication, you just *could* do a mostly cookieless Web.
You prefer not to because you are lazy bastards..
The problem is not the cookies on your site, because your site ain't evil. The problem is making the Web non-functional for people not using cookies. It's like spitting on the road. Maybe you have't got tuberculosis -- but if all do it, epidemia is not far.
So let's get off our collective asses. Pretty please?
-Retargeted Ads Stalk You For Weeks After You Shop.
+Retarded Ads Stalk You For Weeks After You Shop.
Corrected error in headline.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Would be different ads.
I personally can't stand the same ad over... and over... and over.
It's like watching a show on TV... and having every 3rd ad be the *SAME EXACT FUGGIN AD*. Makes me *NOT* buy something.
This is not "privacy violating". You, as an anonymous surfer, looked at a product. Vendors want to try to get the business of anyone that "looked". So what, take of the foil hat and just continue to enjoy your free content and ignore the ad if it bothers you. I, as an anonymous coward, am going to now click and buy some acai berry juice.
your answer is privoxy. it eliminates ALL traffic from naughty ad hosts. so they cant store anything on my PC.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you go to any NFL website you'll get a cookie that records your favorite team. From then on whenever an ad for the NFL pops up you'll get your teams logo. The same goes for Ford cars and trucks but Ford limits the teasing to 2 weeks. Those are the only Dotomi users I know about but I'm sure they are hundreds of others.
With a free moment I browse the for sale on Craigslist. If I see something that looks like a very good deal, I check the interwebs for what that price of said item is new. I may not be shopping for that item and only looked at xyz.com for pricing.
All your marketing dollars now belong to us.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Give Cookie Monster a try:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4703/
It's like NoScript, but for cookies instead of javascript. You can white/black list by subdomain, or parent domain (*.domain). By default, I block all except a whitelist of a few domains of sites I login to. For sites like the New York Times, I simply "temporarily allow" cookies for the current browsing session.
One really nice feature (editable) is that it will delete cookies for the current domain when you change the action from Accept to Reject/Deny.
does this. I was like WTF? Keep on seeing ads for things I searched for a week before.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It's just another test to see what the most effective form of advertising is on the intarwebz. For example a while back the big craze was viral marketing, then it was social media marketing. Spam... point is, it's all pretty annoying if it's not something we're looking for, but conversion rates don't need to be all that high to justify an ad campaign - you only have to look at DubLi to see that these are some pretty effective forms of marketing.
So I look at a product, BUY it, then am constantly targeted with ads urging me to buy it.
WTF?
Bought an N900 from Amazon. For over a month now i've been slammed with ads for Nokia phones and even the marketing emails Amazon sends are telling me I may be interested in a N900...
WTF?
Similar experience.
Phones seem to be especially common in this type of ads. Maybe its because people actually do some research for this type of product, and leave piles of cookies in their browsers.
I also used Amazon, but also Google.
I bought a Nexus One, and they followed me around for two months. We then researched a Samsung/ATT Captivate, and I get those ads now still.
It has nothing to do with whether you BUY it or DON'T BUY it, because its a mindless cookie mining operation.
Somehow researching generic products doesn't trigger this stalking, but higher end gadgets, toys, and smartphones almost always does.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I suspect Zappos in particular may be having an issue, or maybe it's by design. I was shopping for a specific style of Sperry Top-Siders (hello 1984) for my daughter a few weeks ago. I'm now seeing Zappos banner ads everywhere with that specific shoe embedded in the ad.
What are ads? Does firefox not support them or something? Get AdBlock, problem solved. [THIS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY LIGHT-SPEED BRAND BRIEFS]
The Opera browser (and maybe other browsers) has a 'delete cookies on exit' feature. In other words, you can accept cookies when you browse to various websites, but these cookies are not saved between browsing sessions. This is an excellent feature, because you can make it a per-site setting. e.g I'll let my cookies persist for slashdot, or other forums sites, but amazon has its cookies deleted after every browser session automagically. Another nice tactic with keeping facebook data segregated from cookie re-targeting is to have multiple browsers on your computer and dedicate one browser specifically for facebook. On my macbook, I use Opera for daily browsing, firefox for facebook, and safari for banking transactions (there isn't much rhyme or reason as to how I divided up browsers by browsing type, other than I like Opera's UI). Cookies are segregated, less vulnerability to cross site scripting, and this also forces be to copy paste urls for banking sites from emails into safari (since its not the default browser).
A friend was looking at products on Amazon while NOT logged in. Then later started receiving EMAILS from Amazon about that product. So they are linking cookies to your account even if you aren't logged in. Not a great idea considering people use public computers to browse for products.
I can't even remember the last time I looked at an ad. No, I don't have adblock installed; I just don't pay attention to anything in my periphery and I thought *every*body did that these days.
So if you or your wife looks at the naughty toys in an online sex shop, you'll get lurid "batteries not included" stuff popping up on regular web pages as well?
Now there's a thought for sabotaging the browser on someone else's PC! Wait until they're away for a few minutes, then quickly flick through some S&M merchandise pages...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I work for a company that does this. Retargeting is an old, commodity service for retailers. "Prospecting" is the practice of using web- and real-world purchase data to attract customers to a site they haven't yet visited. For example, you go to a sporting goods store and buy a kayak; when you're browsing the web on your phone afterward, you see ads for life vests and paddles and such.
from the Oh No Cmdr Taco Can't Even Spell The Easy Ones Dept.
Social Credit would solve everything...
I use AdBlock Plus of course, so I don't run into this in particular, but I wonder if Amazon's product recommendation feature is relevant here.
Notably, it recommends similar products rather than the exact same thing; that seems like it would be an improvement upon the ads in question. I can see how the two products are considered related, even if it doesn't work perfectly.
For example: "Hey, you bought this Flogging Molly CD; you may also be interested in this Dropkick Murphys CD"
As an aside, since I buy different stuff (at least as far as varied music tastes), the juxtaposed combination of recommendations is sometimes amusing.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I can't understand this article. What are these "ads" they're talking about?
It might make more sense to do what the grocery store does. When I buy a product, the little machine next to the cash register spits out a coupon for either a competing product or a "companion" product, that is something that doesn't compete, but would go well with it. So, instead of seeing the some old smart phone ad for a phone you've already researched, you'd see ads for other phone, cases and earpieces. As a target, I'd rather see a variety of ads. There's more of a chance that I'd see one that's useful. I tend to tune out at best or dislike at worst, an ad that's overplayed.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Being around finance for most of my career has brought me at odds with this particular topic. Banks normally (attempt to) do a very good job at protecting peoples privacy, because a breach usually means fiscal loss - usually for the bank - whether its in the form of a reimbursement to the client or a drop in client retention. However, there are several products out there that now look at historical spend and based upon that, offer advertisements directly in the banking portal for anything from shoes to McDonald's. Talk about privacy invasion. They often target specific demographics by parsing historical trends then matching spending patterns with targeted ads.
If you ask me, far worse than cookie tracking. The worst part about it, is that little piece of paper you sign when creating an account often gives up your rights to your personal data, such that third party firms can connect to the bank's database to deliver these ads.
All of my cash accounts are with independent local banks for that very reason.
I swear its not mine baby!