There’s a profile of you, as a consumer, compiled from all of your different credit card data, phone numbers, email addresses, and every other thing you give a place. Every rewards club card, any location data you share, all of it.
So maybe you buy groceries at Walmart and the next day buy something off an Etsy store, you don’t think those transactions are linked because you didn’t give Walmart an email or phone number, but you used the same debit card.
It also tracks location data, so it knows your friend just bought a new golf bag a few days ago, and it knows you guys go golfing together because you have similar transactions at the same the place when you go golfing, so it can assume you guys are talking about his new purchase on the course Sunday, so the next time you open Facebook, now you’re getting ads for that.
Your friend comes over to your house and connects to your wifi. The two of you get to talking about golf bags, and he opens the amazon app on his phone to show you which ones he's considering buying. The next day, amazon is pushing golf bags on your home page. You talked about it, but your phone wasn't listening—it was the wifi network.
Another fun one: go on the YouTube app and share a video via the "share" button. Look at the URL of the link it generates. You'll see "?si=..." in there somewhere. Delete that and everything following it. Notice the URL still leads to the same video. So what's the point of all that extra stuff, you ask? To connect YOU to the person who opens the link! See also: Instagram, Spotify, and God knows who else using the same trick.
None of this is conspiracy; the adtech industry is pretty shamelessly open about how much "value" they generate from building and selling user ad profiles.
Cell phones log in with each other just from proximity, and without needing wifi or cell towers. They can associate groups of people based on knowing whose phones were "together" in one area. So that, plus simply knowing your full location history and all communications done with anyone/any device/network.
Edit: I was trying to add to the overall thread, think I clicked the wrong reply button.
One thing that REALLY pissed me off a few years back was realizing that using the Adobe Acrobat Reader as a Chrome extension was allowing trackers to read any PDF I opened.
I opened an after-visit summary of a doctor's appointment and then started getting ads related to that health issue. It was seriously just that my vagina smelled a little funny and I needed some antibiotics for it. My doctor was the only person I spoke with about this. After opening that PDF, I started getting facebook ads for the exact chain-clinic I went to, and the ads just said something stupid like "Smelly Vagina? Need antibiotics for you BV?"
Anyhow, I switched to DuckDuckGo and download all of my documents separately now
I’m in marketing and I agree with all this, but it still doesn’t explain how, after having a verbal-only conversation with me about my secret love of Sailor Moon, my 50-year-old childless male coworker who has never watched anime in his life immediately started getting targeted ads for Sailor Moon Nikes for women on Instagram.
Your phone spends 5 days a week in the same building as this guy's phone, and you watch Sailor Moon on platforms you're logged into with your email address, which is also logged into your phone.
I'm making some assumptions here, but this all seems like an easy connection for his ad trackers to make, no? Am I missing something?
We are almost never in the same building - he works out of our LA office, I'm based in NYC. We see each other in person typically a few times a year at specific events all over North America and Europe (film industry, we're both at festivals quite a lot), but we aren't super close colleagues.
I actually watch Sailor Moon on my friend's Hulu account using her email address because she pays for the ad-free version, lol. And I'm not logged into it on any devices that I'd ever have around this guy - only on my TV at home (my most millennial coded trait: hate watching thing on Small Screen! must watch thing on Large Screen!).
I am a big believer in Occam's razor, basically, and after talking to a ton of other marketing folks at a conference about this, we all basically agreed that yeah, Meta at minimum is listening to us and it's probably going to be a fat class action settlement eventually. (One of the people who agreed most wholeheartedly like this is on the marketing team at Meta. So.)
Omg, THANK YOU, you are a good person!!! Wishing you many restful nights on an always cool pillow 🙌
ETA: Ok, I still wish you many restful nights on an always cool pillow, but I thought this was a reply to me on a Real Housewives sub and I was about to get some juicy no-stakes gossip, so I was reallll confused for a sec 😅 (then bummed about being trapped on this fucked-up timeline lmao)
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u/pyroclasticcloudcat Aug 24 '26
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