How do they do it?

adolf hamster

adolf hamster

adolf hamster

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2012
Posts
8,352
This whole targeted ad thing is starting to verge on being creepy.

So i've been getting very much into cappuchino's at work (colleague put me on to them) and i've been buying the nescafe sachet's in the local asda for a while, very handy.

I don't have facebook/twitter, i don't have much of an internet prescence at all, so it's not like they're figuring it out that way, in fact this is the first time i've mentioned anything about liking this kind of coffee on the internet at all.

So can someone kindly tell me how the hell amazon knows i like cappuchino's and is reccomending them to me? The only stuff i've bought on amazon is airsofting kit and stuff for the car, how do they know!?
 
Hyburnate said:
So you've not searched for them on Amazon at all?
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Nope, nothing coffee or tea related ever, not on amazon or google or anywhere else. I'm well used to airsoft kit and car bits popping up in my feed but this is something else.

MooMoo444 said:
You've been buying them a while, you say yourself. Marketing companies know your shopping habits.
Click to expand...

My only link is private conversations via text messages, talking in person, and the transaction data between my bank and asda could possibly link me to liking coffee (well, cappuchino's at least, i dont even own a coffee maker), this is why it's weird.
 
if you have an asda loyalty card, they share your spending habbits.

There are companies dedicated to creating profiles of users to credit agency detail. I nearly worked for one and it was very good at it, cross matching profiles of multiple records and creating a complete, correct profile on customers.
 
codec said:
if you have an asda loyalty card, they share your spending habbits.

There are companies dedicated to creating profiles of users to credit agency detail. I nearly worked for one and it was very good at it, cross matching profiles of multiple records and creating a complete, correct profile on customers.
Click to expand...

Nope, no loyalty cards

I could get them trawling the internet to find out i like vaping stuff, their own records well enough establish my need for outdoors-y things, i'm sure the amount of hits i've got on ocuk has them knowing i like computers.

This is whats really weirding me out is i can't think for the life of me how they could know without some kind of dodgy underhand dealing going on or the prediction algorithm of the century.
 
adolf hamster said:
My only link is private conversations via text messages, talking in person, and the transaction data between my bank and asda could possibly link me to liking coffee (well, cappuchino's at least, i dont even own a coffee maker), this is why it's weird.
Click to expand...


Apps can 'read' your Texts/Emails, Apps can 'use' your Microphone/Camera and listen for key words, Smart chips in Bank/Credit cards can be tracked, you have zero privacy if you have a 'Smart' phone on you and use Cards to pay for things.

Leave the phone at home and buy things only with cash, see how well they track you after a few weeks then ;)
 
I was on Ikea the other day pricing up PC desks. Today on my e-mail page I noticed an Ikea advert showing one of the desks I had been looking at. I can not make the connection between the Ikea site and my BT e-mail page. :confused: I guess my browsing habits are being stored either on my PC or online somwhere.
 
at some point somewhere, you or someone else using a browser you're signed into has typed 'coffee' or 'cappuccino pod' or similar into google or amazon.

They're not tapping into your texts.
 
Maybe you just clicked a link to something coffee related you forgot about.

Sliver said:
I was on Ikea the other day pricing up PC desks. Today on my e-mail page I noticed an Ikea advert showing one of the desks I had been looking at. I can not make the connection between the Ikea site and my BT e-mail page. :confused: I guess my browsing habits are being stored either on my PC or online somwhere.
Click to expand...

Tracking cookies, nothing to do with the BT webmail, they just happened to serve ads from a company that does the IKEA work.
 
Sliver said:
I was on Ikea the other day pricing up PC desks. Today on my e-mail page I noticed an Ikea advert showing one of the desks I had been looking at. I can not make the connection between the Ikea site and my BT e-mail page. :confused: I guess my browsing habits are being stored either on my PC or online somwhere.
Click to expand...

Google AdSense :)
 
adolf hamster said:
Nope, nothing coffee or tea related ever, not on amazon or google or anywhere else. I'm well used to airsoft kit and car bits popping up in my feed but this is something else.



My only link is private conversations via text messages, talking in person, and the transaction data between my bank and asda could possibly link me to liking coffee (well, cappuchino's at least, i dont even own a coffee maker), this is why it's weird.
Click to expand...

you must have googled them at some point and forgotten about it.

The biggest thing with these ads is just looking at what you've searched for. I know I don't keep a mental record of everything I've googled and I don't expect others will do either.
 
I work for a company that develops data converters for optical data networks. Some people from an ad company were chatting to us about stuff, and apparently the biggest problem they have isn't finding out what you've searched for, it's deciding which adverts to show you, and delivering that data to you. That's what uses the traffic.
 
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The ads are getting smarter
 
adolf hamster said:
This whole targeted ad thing is starting to verge on being creepy.

So i've been getting very much into cappuchino's at work (colleague put me on to them) and i've been buying the nescafe sachet's in the local asda for a while, very handy.

I don't have facebook/twitter, i don't have much of an internet prescence at all, so it's not like they're figuring it out that way, in fact this is the first time i've mentioned anything about liking this kind of coffee on the internet at all.

So can someone kindly tell me how the hell amazon knows i like cappuchino's and is reccomending them to me? The only stuff i've bought on amazon is airsofting kit and stuff for the car, how do they know!?
Click to expand...


Did you even do a search on google or Amazon?
 
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