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Comment by derekp7

1 year ago

Something similar -- while on a family visit at my parents' house, my brother was talking about his upcoming Hawaii trip, Specifically he was going over a snorkeling adventure he signed up for.

For the next week or so, I got many ads on my phone about underwater packages for Hawaii, along with ads for various snorkeling and swimming gear. Now I had never researched any of that on my phone, however obviously my brother has. And the ad trackers saw that both my phone and his had communicated out over the same IP address (my parents wifi) on other random internet connections, so that is probably why they were then targeting my tracker cookie with ads that would be related to his tracker cookie. (This is all technically "easy" for the trackers to do, and seems logical that they would, because "why not").

On an unrelated note, I was making a peanut butter sandwich, started browsing some sites, and started getting ads for Skippy peanut butter. My phone must have smelled the peanut butter in the air.

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derekp7

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aembleton  1 year ago

Until my wife installed UBo, this was helpful in finding presents for her. Because I was using UBo, I could switch it off, browse Facebook and all of my ads were being targetted at her. I could see everything she was considering buying.

It was impressively creepy and a good way of surprising her with something she hadn't said anything about but was considering buying.

philsquared_  1 year ago

You have hit the nail on the head but it doesn't even need to be wifi and it also doesn't have to be that complicated. They see that two devices are in the same area for a long period of time so they serve ads for other peoples web history. Jarringly enough ever since I had this realization I sometimes see ads for things that reveal something meant to be private of those I had just spent time with. Also, seeing peoples ads when they make desktop recordings of their screen can be extremely telling..

Breza  1 year ago

Exactly. Years ago, I did due diligence on a company that targets ads using IP address. They buy IP address data from ISPs, target ads based on demographics, and then use cookies to retarget. Not that far off of what you're describing.