I wish tech companies knew more about me

Honestly, I've found it's easier and cheaper to just pay for content; instead of having my content peppered with annoying ads and then buying junk I don't want to support the content.

I would gladly fill out a purchasing intent form and consent to having ads shown to me by companies I have never heard of selling the thing I am looking to buy. I would much rather do this than have pervasive, passive data collection, and then have advertisers use that data to guess what I want.

I turned on personalized advertising on my google phone once hoping to get actually related ads. It did change ads, but after a while I realized I was having hard time ignoring ads. I turned it off.

Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)

I sometimes think that people believing targeted advertising doesn’t work is exactly why it does.

In the sense that you aren’t able to build an immune system against it.

> could you guys at least use some of it?

Why would you think that companies want to use this information for your good?

I don't think that they care. Orders of magnitude more resources are poured into A/B retention testing than to user's actual quality of life improvement

"Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen."

Programmers :-D

Well informed technical people should have the right to ensure what their liqueur store and pharmacy receipts are shared with their insurance provider to accurately model risks so their rates increase if that is what they want. Everyone is entitled to their kinks.

But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.

Who is advertising for ? Maybe your mistake is supposing it is to benefit you in any way shape or form ?

"I wish the farmer knew more about me, it gives me corn but what I want is sunlight !"

Paraphrasing comedian Connor O'Malley

> I'm so jealous of my son because he's 5 years old and they've been collecting all this data on him since he was in the womb and by the time he's my age he's going to have a much better customer experience than I'll ever get

Let's just follow this wishful line of thinking down the success train. So say we have all your data and are perfectly executing on it. What would that world look like? It probably won't have any ads at all. However, when he walks from his house to catch his flight an English speaking taxi will already be waiting, he will be dropped at just the right terminal and his baggage will vanish only to seamlessly re-appear at his hotel in Germany, while he enjoys a flight to Germany with just the right snacks and beverages of his liking on a plane ride, while listening to vocal free techno music.

Sounds impossible to figure out.

Above all, avoid googling for really expensive things.

That time where all the ads I got for months were ads for ridiculously expensive servers, after I had (out of curiosity) googled for "what is the most expensive server you can buy on ebay?"

Or the time when all I got was ads for military-grade cables and connectors for months, after having googled (out of curiosity) for something or another about submarines -- most likely something about the dud submarines that the UK had sold to the Canadian government.

What surprises me is that this is state of affairs for Google, a company with unlimited budget - to show you ads for things you expressed just a slightest interest in or have already purchased. And it's a state for a loooooong time.

Like - I just purchased some plants from Dibleys, a plant nursery in UK. I've gotten confirmation email to my gmail account. Now I'm served plant ads for that very same company. I'd expect that The Algorithm would be smart to decide "hey, here is a guy that is interested in plants, let's take a look at other people in his age group and occupation, what are they also interested in, and let's serve him ads for that. Or having failed that ads for other plant nurseries in UK". But no! It's astounding, that it's so utterly mindlessly stupid.

But you know what, actually I prefer that there's no computational effort here. Maybe this means that me being served a shitty ad for a company I like and already know will not attribute to global warming. Maybe this means that Dibleys isn't being charged for a clickthrough, but for impressions that cost a lot less. Maybe this cyclical stupidity is something that we're stuck with as a human race, because why the fuck should an ad serve some kind of purpose.

> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.

Actually they have and they use it to charge advertisers who want to target you.

Hope this helps and reassures you! Now get back to the trough, piggy! And don't complain about the taste again!

You are the product!

Not to brag, but I don't have any of these problems. I also don't have a google account

I tend to agree, if you have my information, use it to make my experience better!

If the ad market was efficient and worked for the end user it would not work for google/meta/amazon. Their client is the marketing executive with the budget who is under pressure to spend it and not the end-user who is overwhelmed with ads.

I don't understand the skepticism that people who bought something are more likely than a randomly selected person to buy another one of that kind of thing. Yes, even stuff like mattresses. If you think about it for more than ten seconds it should be obvious why this is true.

Like it really much. Very valid points!

The ad-example with the ovens/AEG appliances could also be designed for someone who recently moved in to a new home. But nevertheless, point of the OP is still valid.

recentl i watched a classic stone old german/french spy movie "Le Serpent" on prime video on the smart tv. not ending it.

i went to bed and opened youtube. guess what, there it was again.

This is like saying "If I have to eat the shit sandwich, then it should at least have the mustard I like on it."

My favorite waste of ad money I see is google maps constantly putting "Dollar Tree" as a suggested/sponsored search. Problem is the closest dollar tree is 100KM away.

This is so true - my favorite is when I have hard time to buy something and after I buy my dream thing, the flood of adds with better deals kill my happiness for getting it cheaply:-)

If there's anyone working for YouTube here, instead of the "I'm not interested" button I'd like a free text input where I can describe what exactly I don't like about a video.

I follow a few football pages and FB shows more football pages, mostly rival teams. Guess what, I hate the rivals.

The answer to this is not better information for better ads. It's a Pi-hole or other DNS level ad blocking + uBlock origin.

I think that in theory, advertising based monetization is fine, but practically speaking, the incentives are so terrible that it invariably leads to bad outcomes. The reality of our ad-supported web is unsustainable and unacceptable and it needs to die. This does mean that lots of things will go away, and that we will be paying for a lot more things, but that's far preferable to the current state of the internet.

I wish I was served ads for asphalt cleaning tractors

Its as bad, or even worse.

Amazon keeps recommending me sequel to books I never finished (which they know as on kindle it tracks how many page you read), or books I gave 1 star reviews to.

I often scream at my Kindle/Audible app: "My brother, you know I hate that series and gave it a 1 star why do you keep recommeding it?"

And I have to go thru crappy Goodreads lists to find an interesting book

Be careful what you wish for, because you might actually get it

> I live in Helsinki

So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.

If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.

The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.

On YouTube, I get the same rotation of 3 ads almost constantly. A shampoo that I have no interest in, a detergent that I used to have (but no longer, because I associate with spam), and a dusting brush (I had no idea these things still existed!)

Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.

I've been making this point for at least 10y, and I think it's gotten 0% better. It's already infuriating how much data is collected about me against my will and any sense of ethics, but it makes me LIVID that all this invasion of privacy has completely shit results. Pretty sure I'd be more sensitive to advertising if it was fully random, at least I'd see stuff I was curious about or didn't expect I'd be interested in, instead of myriads of variations of things I already bought or that are adjacent to something I bought (and therefore I already have too).

they know plenty about you, they just don't care what you want.

> My user account, system locale, browser locale, and keyboard settings are all set to English. I am logged into Chrome and all Google services. I travel to Germany every few months, and lots of services that I've been using for years suddenly decide I speak German.

This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.

> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.

This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.

Terrible targeting has a simple explanation.

Advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want. They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.

And if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you should be happy - it means you're hiding from them quite well.

Any "discovery" algorithm that shows you a wildly varying set of things is still mostly in explore mode. And if they're easy to tune out and swat away you can be grateful.

As ads are inherently adversarial I prefer in fact badly targeted ads.

I do not want ads matching my weaknesses and likely to convince me to buy anything.

Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.

All the terrible targeting is because advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want.

They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.

Also if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you're doing pretty good on the hiding.

I wish they knew both more and less, depending. No paradox just a synthesis per the Hegelian dialectic. I've seen ads which were clearly leveraging a creepy/dangerous piece of info they had about me. And I've seen dumb ads trying to sell me products I no longer have any reasonable interest in because I just fricken bought them the damn thing.

The advertising ecosystem is bad and broken in both directions within the dimensions of what they know, how much they know and in how they leverage it.

I worked for Google for 10 years. All of my personal email and all of my work email (back then, Google, now CMU) goes through Gmail. They know basically everything that's ever been sent as a receipt in an email. They know what I watch on YouTube, what I search for Google, and Android's little Google rootkit knows everywhere I go, and by extension, everyone I hang out with. They know I install an adblocker everywhere I can. I rail against advertising and tracking on the internet (this site) all the time.

Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite.

...and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).

I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.

Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!

I did a search (not on Google) for an unusual sensor the other day. I found a candidate and went to their web site and looked at some data sheets. All of a sudden, I see ads for this company on every page with Google ads (and ther are a LOT of those!)

I feel sorry for the company - obviously, Google hasn't been able to place those ads because its such a niche product and need. So once they "got a live one", they started serving me this company's ads *everywhere* (and I research and browse a *lot*).

I'm pretty sure I was perhaps the only target of their entire ad budget for the month - I was literally served ads for this tiny company *thousands* of times.

Note that only Google gained here - the ads didn't make me any more likely to buy a product I already knew about (and won't need for months in any case), and they did nothing to actually help the company reach more potential buyers. But the ad inventory was placed, and no doubt, each superfluous impression dutifully billed for...

Here's a comment I couldn't send on hn a couple of days ago because of limit, I saved it as a txt file in my desktop. The context was a user claiming we should assume everything we do, even typing into a form, is or will be public.

"if you take a look at most systems, they are almost all broken and no one has much control over them. I can't send a sales inquiry, let alone a tech support request through a 'contact us' form most of the time, why would I believe that what I typed into a form would somehow reach an all-seeing panopticon?

Even if it's collected, I'd assume no one is looking at it, and many court dockets demonstrate stuff like this, while you routinely see cases where criminals or school shooters are caught, you also see cases of crimes that occur, but there's like 3 months of chat history where the dude was speaking in crazyish about purging the world and offing themselves."

I'll add that there's a lot of laws where the disclosure of information is mandated, but in that case the workload becomes so high that it's very unlikely someone will sift through it. Like financial information sharing between countries or between business and Tax Collection Entities. Sure every transaction above X amount gets sent to the other country or to the IRS, but considering that you have to pay high hourly fees to your accountant to go through your transactions, why would someone else go through them for free?

Google almost certainly uses stuff in your gmail to recommend ads to you. I had a very, very specific thing that was ongoing for a year or so and as soon as I sent someone an email about it last week, a lot of ads starting showing up for that very specific, not common situation on YouTube.

How are we blocking ads on an iPhone these days?

> All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".

Amazon surely have some ofthe best engineers in the world, and it's surprisng they can't figure out this problem. No, now that I have purchased a fridge, I don't want to buy a second fridge.

Companies track us with cookies[1] [1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/how-cookies-became-the-we...

Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people - If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise. Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless.

Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?

it's not just third-party ads, the worst is even on companies' own websites. i.e., I'll be signed into an airline for which I have the airline CC and I'll be hit with a bunch of suggestions to sign up for their credit card. That's information they already have.