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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is curious whether I’m exaggerating, I had to check a vendor presentation for work. The video is on YouTube, and the first ad I saw reads:

> Beauties From Eastern Europe > Chat and meet real Slavic women > Sponsored > love-stories

with a photo (presumably AI-generated) where to be completely honest, I could see that she was wearing red lacey underwear and had had a full bikini wax.

Do you know what kind of question I want to have from my boss when discussing a vendor? NOT WHY DOES GOOGLE THINK I WOULD FINANCIALLY SUPPORT LITERAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING.

So guess what I’m activating on my browser to NOT GET FIRED.

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I'm a homosexual. Youtube ads have been showing me ads for soft porn depicting underaged anime girls, explicit porn barely covering the girls' sexual parts, and dating apps for dating mature women for several years now.

A brain the size of a planet, and Google still can't figure out this is the last thing I would click on?

Some years ago i was listening to Viktor Tsoi / KINO music on YT. KINO was a russian band that disbanded in the 90ies.

So several times a week, i got YT Ads in russian. I did not understand a word.

Have you ever looked at the interface for buying ads on Google/Facebook/other? They don't use an algorithm to decide who to show ads to. The ad buyer decides who they want to show the ad to.

I click systematically, and it almost always says they picked a broad category, like “Men between 25 and 75 in [country].” There’s usually some phrasing that is meant to be ambiguous or unclear but that I have to interpret as “based on your other behavior.” I can only assume neither I nor the gay commentator earlier have ever done anything that expressed an interest in either underage pornography or AI-generated female honeypots, and so that “smart” implicit targeting really needs some serious scrutiny.

I get the joke that it reveals what I do in private. I’ve made it myself when people are complaining about Twitter—usually after confirming the rest of their activity matches the prejudice that I’m lobbing at them. What I can assure you is not happening, in public or in private, is me speaking Finnish or Cantonese.

Yes, and that's why I conclude that Google must have terrible targeting and wastes advertisers money.

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