Comment by melomal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by melomal | Hacker News Reader

I have an amazing story.

Moved into a new place, in Poland. Bought a new smart TV, it was a Samsung (kaput after 2 years). Me and my wife decided to have an impromptu singing session just bellowing out 'Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel, Hotel' in a Pitbull (Cuban rapper) style whilst looking for holidays to book.

Within the next 5 minutes, Trivago was on the TV. Now bear in mind I have literally never seen Trivago being advertising on the TV and all of a sudden their catchphrase at the end of the ad got me 'Hotel, Trivago'.

Safe to say me and wife had a few minutes of WTF just staring at the screen then each other. That's when I truly became convinced that everything is listening. Could have been a coincidence though but it was an almighty coincidence to say the least.

>looking for holidays to book

Well, I assume you weren't looking through an offline printed holiday guide of some sort :-)

This. We always get targeted youtube ads after googling things. Creepy AF.

Google and youtube are the same company, so it's not exactly surprising that they'd share data. As for whether it's creepy, I'd say it isn't because you explicitly gave up that data. This is slightly different than something like google/facebook tracking you via third party cookies, because that involves no consent at all.

Sounds like coincidence mixed with confirmation bias. The likelier explanation for stories like this.

I do lean more towards coincidence but since then there's been no Trivago ads.

To be honest, the ads on TV are basically on repeat so this is why it stood out so much, the fact that I can practically give you the schedule of ads that I am about to be shown during a break which does not include Trivago is what gets me.

> whilst looking for holidays to book

Cookies, IP addresses

Also, maybe not in this case but more generally, GPS

Reality is nuanced in a way that nothing was actually listening, but there were also other stuff going on that people don't expect, like credit card companies selling purchase history data, or companies buying data sets to aggregate, correlate and de-anonymize them. But the fact remains that whenever there's something, it's going to be abused.

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