Coincidence?

[Red Squirrel]

Its freaky all the ways they can track us, wish there were more blanket ways to block it, you'd think it wouldn't be that hard but guess it is.

My favourite "coincidence" when I was at work once, we got a tower light alarm on a cell tower, I made ticket to have contractor go change it. Casually mentioned it would be kind of fun to climb a tower to do that job.

5 minutes later on FB I see an ad for the contracting company we use, it was a job ad for an opening they had. Never seen an ad for that company anywhere on the internet before. They're not exactly a mainstream company.

This is back before I used a custom rom on my phone, so guessing it heard my convo then linked it to FB. Google, Apple, Facebook etc all share each other's data in real time.

 

[dullard]

On different platforms. I search on their web page. The ad was served on X. Trying to figure how the connection was made.

I already answered that.

An invisible 1x1 square pixel on Amazon gathers your unique fingerprint information and gives it to advertisers. The advertisers store your fingerprint including the exact product that you were looking at that had that pixel. You can delete cookies, change apps, use different platforms, use incognito mode, or whatever you want. It doesn't matter. The advertisers have already stored your unique fingerprint information.

Then when X asks for an ad from those advertisers, it uses that information to advertise the exact product from that 1x1 pixel that you previously viewed. No cookies are involved in many cases now.

 

[Red Squirrel]

But how does X get that information? Wouldn't whoever is hosting that 1x1 square need to share it with everyone? I assume that's what happens.

 

[dullard]

But how does X get that information? Wouldn't whoever is hosting that 1x1 square need to share it with everyone? I assume that's what happens.

X does not need to get the information. X needs to provide the advertiser with space to advertise and the fingerprint of the user. The advertiser fills in the rest with the data that they took when visiting Amazon.

 

[dank69]

There's a few ways it's done.

example a) you search for an item on amazon, logged in as you. It creates a cookie on your machine that is available to ad trackers on sites. You go to twitter (or any other site) with an ad platform, it checks for your cookies, finds the relevant info, and advertises to you based on that cookie.

example b) a connection is made from your IP to amazon associated with searches with xyz product. Henceforth when you go to a site with amazon's hooks into it, the advertising platform reads your IP connecting to that site, and advertises to you. This is how you end up with ads on your (digital) tv for shit you googled, on a separate platform, even through incognito.

There's nuance behind all this, but suffice to say that you have a digital persona that is known to The Internet (tm) and is tracked far and wide, between sites, platforms, countries. Every time you touch the internet in a way it can cross-associate back to your digital persona, it will do so.

Just to add to this, unless you are making the effort to obfuscate your info at all times, all these tech companies most likely know all your email addresses, physical addresses, mac addresses, phone numbers, IPs, health data, how many times you masturbate per day, and what types of porn you like. All indexed and backed up to multiple hardened locations.

 

[pete6032]

I have a great example of this. Recently my preschool age child began bringing home loads and loads of artwork from preschool. I usually throw it away after a few days. I had a conversation yesterday with my spouse about how long we should save the artwork before disposing of it. We have never discussed this topic before. Never did any web searches or any kind of internet engagement regarding the topic, just a spoken discussion with my spouse.

The same evening I opened up the Facebook app on my phone and there was an article recommended from The Atlantic about why it is justified to throw away children's artwork. Seems oddly coincidental.

 

[KLin]