points by tjansen 2 days ago | 0 comments
This! I don't mind tech companies knowing things about me. If I don't want them to know, I browse in Safari's anonymous mode.
But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying. I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.
[–] ryandrake 2 days ago
[–] YurgenJurgensen 2 days ago
You want them to advertise things you won’t buy; that’s far less bad than them advertising things you shouldn’t buy but might if pushed, which is the ultimate goal of the corporate mind control machine.
[–] tjansen 2 days ago
You think of it as the corporate mind control machine. I think of it as "oh, I am looking for a new car and completely forgot Subaru is also making cars that fit my profile - I should test drive them as well".
[–] thereader12 1 day ago
The op was complaining that that is not happening. Maybe a Subaru WRX is perfect for you, maybe you really need a Honda Fit and the WRX kinda technically fits if you force it and the ads mislead you into thinking you need horsepower and awd car for your temperate zone inner city shopping trips.
[–] seizethecheese 2 days ago
The issue of you already buying something is interesting to me. It’s so obvious that they’d fix it if it cause revenue loss. My guess is that conversion for any ad is so low that you’re indeed more likely to buy a lot of products twice rather than buying something totally different.
[–] tjansen 2 days ago
No, it's really difficult for 'them' to find out whether you actually purchased something. All the tracking stuff is on social media and the product browsing pages. But not on checkout. Shopping sites can't allow all that stuff there because of security and privacy issues. So big tech doesn't even know whether you bought something. They only know what you have seen. That's why they keep showing it.
[–] tarxvf 2 days ago
Conversion tracking is not merely a thing, I'm under the extremely strong impression that it's standard.
[–] tjansen 2 days ago
The owner of the shopping site can do it. They know which campaign lead to a sell.
But I have never heard of them passing it on to whatever 3rd party trackers they have on their sites. THAT would be a privacy violation.
[–] jolt42 2 days ago
At least they aren't showing you something you would be tempted to buy?
[–] tjansen 2 days ago
That's not always good. If I am looking for a kind of product, and an ad recommends a possibly better product that I didn't know about, both sides benefit from it.
[–] jolt42 2 days ago
It seems they don't know you already bought it, which... maybe they don't and do you want them to?
[–] mysterydip 2 days ago
This happens on places like amazon too, that know I bought a toaster, then show me sponsored results for 50 more toasters.
[–] Tyr42 2 days ago
I think they theory is that you are more likely to have some sort of buyers remorse and return that toaster and buy a new one than a baseline person is to suddenly buy a toaster.
I'm not sure if that's true, but that's the theory.
[–] efficax 2 days ago
that’s literalist what they know. it’s called retargeting and it’s the point of these ad systems, to track what people buy to understand how to link buying patterns to other info about people
[–] IAmBroom 2 days ago
If I buy a car, I get flushed with ads for cars. Really. Same for an area rug, a vacuum cleaner, and many other things I will never buy two in a row of.
That's just stupid.
Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.
We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.