Study: Thousands of businesses just love handing over your info to Facebook The startlingly extent to which websites and brokers hand over details of people's habits to Facebook was revealed Wednesday. A study by Consumer Reports and non-profit The Markup concluded that for the average lone Facebook user, 2,230 companies, and in some cases more than 7,000, will hand over that person's information to …
It's kind of amazing that even Facebook and Alphabet and Amazon that have a lot of data almost never show relevant ads.1
The Central Scrutinizer never asked the second question in your post, he merely pointed out targeted advertising didn't work in his case.
People that do not want to be tracked complaining about the tracking itself and pointing out it doesn't even work as advertised by the ad-slingers seems straight forward to me. Complaining about the targeted ads not working is done in the hope that advertisers check if their ad campaign increased sales and if not stop paying the ad slingers and thus stop funding the tracking. Of course the ad slingers love to give it a "it would work better with more data" spin instead.
1I believe some of the ad slingers have more than enough data to know i am not interested in most of those products they show me ads for but they'd rather take their customers money to show me irrelevant ads than telling those customers "Sorry, there are just not all that many people interested in your product":
"I believe some of the ad slingers have more than enough data to know i am not interested in most of those products they show me ads for"
I doubt it. It's the sort of thing they'll scrupulously not know. If push came to shove they'd need to be able to prove that they never did know such a thing.
"in the hope that advertisers check if their ad campaign increased sales and if not stop paying the ad slingers"
Many years ago (~30) I paid a shedload of money to a regional daily newspaper (remember those? Dead trees and carbon markings?) for a 2 month ad campaign which netted precisely one customer
Meantime a single small ad in the classified of a national paper netted more than 100 customers (at 1% of the cost)
Needless to say I was unimpressed and said as much to the regional daily. Their response was to automatically renew the advertising and try to sign me into spending 3 times more than I already had - They were told where they could get off and attempts to bill me were rebuffed because I'd documented that they'd been told I wasn't renewing (but did so anyway)
This was just before the "rise of the Internet". Experimentation showed that radio ads gave the best bang for the buck, whilst TV ads got good results but were simply too expensive (The days of 3-4 national channels and no local ones) to be viable
Ad slingers are like problem gamblers - they "big up" the wins, handwave away the losses and DON'T CARE that they're as irritating as a piece of glass inside your sock. They sell "targetted advertising" as a way to pitch fridge adverts to someone who's just purchased a fridge, etc (Very much a case of the "I have a system" line that gamblers and pyramid scammers resort to) and in many ways they're no different to the timeshare scammers, just one step removed from endusers
I have been informed by advertisements of products — mostly books, a few tools and other items — that I did not know of, wanted, bought (or received as gifts from family), and liked. Unlike some, I am not magically aware of every thing that I might want in my life.
I used an email address for Facebook I didn't use anywhere else, gave them a false birthday (I just turned 120 on Jan 1!) and geolocation on my IP comes up about 50 miles from where I live - and I know there are around a dozen other people with the same name as me in that wide area.
Now granted for most people using the same email address for Facebook they use to buy a sofa will lead to ads for furniture for the next month, so maybe the response to this ought to be encouraging people to create a new email address for their online shopping so Facebook loses that linkage and poor Zuck loses a few tens of billions in net worth due to the falling stock price.
For most people it will be pretty trivial to use some identifier like the advertising Id on their mobile phone or browser finger printing to figure out that both the email adress for the online shopping and the facebook account is used by the same person. Simply using two different email adresses won't be enough.
I never login via the web so they can't do browser fingerprinting on me, and they don't have the advertising ID since Apple zeroed that out and made Zuck all upset. There might be some way they can link me to some of my shopping, but I don't ever see ads related to anything I've bought so if they are they aren't doing a very good job of it.
I do see a lot of ads for stuff for old people, so that birthdate in 1904 is obviously being believed by their algorithms lol
You'd think Consumer Reports would be supporting the consumers'' mission and not merely using consumers to support its own.
But clearly, when contempt for individuals has spread even to their supposed defenders, there's little hope of any kind of regulation in the face of lucratively vested interests.
Farcebreak's final insults to my waining intelligence occurred when they were happy to cover my Home page with (very sneaky) "the text in a photo" adverts - promoting Isreal as "the" best country to lead the world.
I don't need to say much more, other than I had already been bombarded for many months with ads promoting all the different flavours of Christianity. Since I've been a practicing atheist since before I was 16 and I turned 71 last week, I am happy to report that the targetting of these adverts is somewhat off - by a good number of miles.
It wasn't the absolutely ludicrous suggestion that Isreal could and should rule the world which made me decide once and for all that Facecreep is a complete waste of time. It was the fact that posts made by my family and friends were so very much lower in number than the number of useless ads (which had supposedly been targetted at me).
In the past I have satisfied myself that FarceBreak was pretty poor at targeting me with advertising, partly as I live on the breadline without a disposable income - but now I am convinced that their mediators are attempting to wind me up, with the sole intention of making me rather angry. Still, Isreal ruling the world has to be the least believable advert I've seen yet. And most definitely, it is time to make for the exit ensuring to throw the key into the nearest river.
Influencers ? Listening ? Targetting ? WTF ?
ALF
>atheist blogs, the sites are full of ads for Christianity related shit
2 possibilities:
1, you cynically use Christian ad spend to fund your atheist blog.
2, you start an atheist blog just to attract Christian ad-spend. (I assume el'reg is full of Apple ads trying to convert the readers to the cult of rounded corners - Between Brave and piHole I never see an ad)
Amazon are the worst, despite having the best data.
I buy stuff for work, presents on behalf of less-than-techie parents, and geek toys for me.
Amazon are currently recommending I buy contractor grade trash bags, Duct tape, power saw blades and baby booties - I hope the FBI aren't watching.
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