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Comment by jccalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time getting worked up about getting tracked online. I'm looking at Facebook's suggested groups right now. I've been on facebook since around 2013. The groups they try to suggest to me are:

one for a game I play that I used facebook to log into. Makes sense.

1st edition advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I haven't mentioned Dungeons and dragons and haven't played it since the mid 1980s

Grindr aesthetics. I am hetero so I'm not sure what this is.

Indy Nostalgia. I live in Indiana so I guess that is somewhat relevant.

Hearthstone Australia. I live in Indiana and I don't play Hearthstone.

A few days ago I was talking about this with a friend and looked and facebook had suggested I join a group for progressive Asian-American Christians. I am not Asian-American or a Christian.

If this is the best they can do with 15 years worth of data then I don't think I have too much to worry about.

View on HN

Future you may rue the day you ever let Facebook's tentacles down your throat.

The data being collected about you is permanent. It can be combined with other data to shine spotlights into your life you thought were off limits forever.

The data can also be used to distort what really happened through careful editing of the record.

This is just beginning.

Remember that that's just the interface they present to you. It's entirely possible that they simply haven't put much effort here and no one's worked on improving those models.

However, what they present to advertiser could be completely different, since that's where the money is.

And that’s just the start. Cambridge Analytica comes to mind instantly, but what other nasties are lurking about down there?

I buy running shoes from Amazon. The next 4 weeks Facebook and Reddit and random websites show me nothing but ads for running shoes. I already have my shoes, don't need another pair, thank you.

Am I a minority, not being a serial shoe shopper? Or is whatever machine learning those companies are running really that simplistic?

The shoe market has 'whales' who spend a double-digit percentage of a median income on shoes every year.

That said, no, it's really that simplistic. Amazon will do the same thing for vacuum cleaners, and vacuum cleaner whales do not exist, as far as I know.

I've had this happen to me many times before. My assumption was always that they can see that you looked for running shoes but not that you bought them.

It's worth noting that using adblockers and similar gizmos will significantly limit the amount of data these companies capture about you, and will therefore drastically reduce the relevance of what they show you.

However, the overwhelming majority of Internet users don't use blockers, and are tracked wherever they go. Not just on the Internet, but in many places in real life too.

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