Comment by pasbesoin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pasbesoin | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote: Two days ago, I bought some drain cleaner. I paid with a credit card. This morning, for the first time, Facebook presented me with an ad for Liquid Plumber (a drain cleaner).

Without my ever giving them my credit card number, they or the attendant ad agency have cross-linked my credit card with my Facebook account. :-(

This may be more noticeable to me, because Facebook on my phone is one of the few places I haven't blocked ads. I don't block them out of spite; I block them because, 1) They completely distract me, when they move and make noise; 2) I've yet to encounter an ad network I trust.

I simply don't do much secure stuff on my phone, and I use a separate email account on it that's not tied to anything significant.

Facebook on my phone is also eerie in presenting content and ads that relate to what I've recently been doing. If they aren't outright monitoring my conversations, they are damned good at determining my location (while my GPS is turned off) and making remarkable inferences as to what the topics at hand likely were.

If it weren't the default means my wide-ranging friends use to keep in touch, I'd by having a serious conversation with myself today as to whether it was time to uninstall it. I'm still debating; just don't want to fall out of touch with those friends.

P.S. As has been mentioned here frequently, FB maintains shadow profiles for people who don't have Facebook accounts.

Facebook is becoming a primary connection / cross-reference between market activity (e.g. shopping) and personal data (not just ZIP, age, etc. demographics, but likes and activities, and that all-important social network).

So here's the thing I don't understand:

After buying some drain cleaner, the mighty machine learning algorithms created by the best of the best ivy league grads comes up with the perfect ad to show you:

An ad for more draincleaner.

Amazon is actually really really good at this :-) They follow me all over the internet for _weeks_ to show me ads about a product that I have already purchased via amazon itself !

While it might seem nonsensical to advertise something you have already purchased, the next time you need to purchase it chances are the brands you saw in ads will seem more trustworthy.

Same situation with me! I purchased a pasta maker (one of those fairly expensive 'automated' ones), and Amazon keeps suggesting I buy another one!

I'm actually not particularly surprised. The drop-off rate of people with something in the cart is shockingly high. I think it used to be 99%, but that was before people were as used to buying online, so that may have dropped, but I bet it's still high.

I suspect there are two factors at play. One might be a chinese wall between search/ads and purchasing. There might be regulatory restrictions about using purchasing data, so they legally can't use it. And in the absence of precognition about anything else you want, ads for something you were looking for recently probably perform pretty well for re-capturing those drop-offs vs. the alternative (random goods?).

The other one (and this is less about Amazon) is that the algorithms aren't driven by machines, it's by people. Generally the computer looks at all the ads, calculates the likelihood that you'll click on each one, and multiplies that by the price of that ad to get expected value. Then it just shows you the top n sorted by expected value decreasing. Some of that calculation depends on user behavior (like lowering the percentage the more often you see the ad), but a lot of it depends on what advertisers are willing to pay. And those people are human. They're guessing what you are likely to search for when you need their services or reading articles about their topics. And they have shockingly little control over how to target users.

Whenever I hear someone say "Google is selling your information" I urge them to set up an AdWords account and try to buy some information. I have one set up for my own name (useful when interviewing to help guide people to me instead of similarly named people, and to exert influence over the content associated with me). I have my CPC set to $0.05 with a max of $1/day and no funding unless I want it to start showing up. It was highly educational.

That is very Orwellian and disturbing to me. We are treated like farm animals, domesticated for our data, and most people seem to be perfectly okay with it.

Not sure what to think right now.

> We are treated like farm animals

like the saying goes: if you're not paying, you're the product

But how else will you find out what Disney princess you are? Or what complete strangers ate for breakfast? Facebook knows whats best for us. I for one welcome our all knowing algorithmic overlords.

The company most likely have a Facebook conversion pixel on their site to record user activity (i.e. you buying a product) which is passed back to FB, and you've been retargeted by another company who have stipulated that they want their ads shown to people who are interested in drain cleaner or similar.

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/651294705016616

They haven't linked your credit card.

I should have clarified. I purchased it in a physical store. No loyalty card or such. Just, I paid for it with a credit card.

I've never before seen an ad for a drain cleaner on FB. I've a pretty good memory for such things.

P.S. I made no mention of using it, nor of the situation with the drain, on FB.

I'd be very surprised if this actually came via credit card. I'd believe a loyalty program.

You also never searched for anything related to slow drains or how to handle them on any of your machines? Or anyone else in the household? Anything in browser history that would have identified a page.

This just seems like one of those areas where credit card companies or banks would be opening themselves up for some pretty large lawsuits.

/me rushes to cancel some purchases of goods he doesn't want his kids to see him being retargetted for

No, no searches. I've used drain cleaner since... well, before the Internet as we now know it, at least. No need to search.

The supermarket I shopped at got rid of its longstanding loyalty card, a couple of years ago. They still have some coupon thing I refuse to use, and a card for a gas price break, that I also don't use.

As far as I know, credit card companies are not prohibited from sharing/selling your detailed history. Not in the U.S., at least.

I have speculated that the supermarket got rid of its loyalty card in part because, with so many people shopping with credit/debit cards these days, they could still identify most customers by the card they paid with.

It might then in turn be possible that they sold my activity to whatever ad network and/or Facebook.

But, I'm betting on the bank.

Regardless, I've never before received an ad for drain cleaner on FB. And this is not the only case where FB ads have followed shortly upon some unique experience that those ads then in turn related to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com