Google's "profiling" is really creepy

[pmv]

I really hate the way Google tracks you (no matter how many precautions you take - like using duckduckgo for searches most of the time) and then in an utterly ham-fisted fashion, tries to target adverts 'appropriate for you'. I gather they spy on you by tracking your IP address, so deleting cookies doesn't help.

I guess it's another reason to use an ad-blocker (I keep alternately using one for long periods then for one-reason-or-other removing it again).

It just comes across as creepy, and it isn't even remotely accurate or effective, because they make such leaps of logic in connecting sites you've visited or search terms you've used, to products.


In particular I hate the way so many of the ads I see clumsily shoehorn in what they think they know about my age ("Over [N]'s will love this [irrelevant product I don't care about that people roughly within a couple of decades of my age are supposed to be interested in]") or just pointlessly mention where they _think_ I live (usually based on where the ISP is routing me through, which is miles away). It doesn't make me any more likely to buy whatever it is they are selling, it comes over more as subtly-threatening than anything (there's a reason why "I know where you live" is a comment often made by thugs on TV dramas).

Plus it makes me occasionally get paranoid as to whether my internet connection is being piggy-backed by someone else, so often does Google's idea about my demographics seem to be wildly wrong (each advert I see now I wonder "why do they think I'd be interested in that?"...checks again that wifi is turned off on the router)

E.g. I visit some forum to discuss repairing 20-year-old electronic devices and I get ads for high-end ultra-expensive hifi gear. I visit a right-wing-leaning site to read what conservatives are saying about something and I get adverts for clothes with neo-nazi slogans on them.

It simply doesn't work as far as showing me ads for things I might actually be wanting to buy, all it does is constantly remind me they are watching me.

 

[Captante]

I especially enjoy seeing ads for stuff pop up that I've only talked about in-range of my phone but never actually searched for....

 

[lxskllr]

I can't remember the last ad I saw. Aside from a couple forums that use static ads by sponsors(cool by me). I haven't seen an ad in almost 20 years. If I wanted to see a personalized ad, where would I turn off my ad block, and go?

 

[pmv]

I can't remember the last ad I saw. Aside from a couple forums that use static ads by sponsors(cool by me). I haven't seen an ad in almost 20 years. If I wanted to see a personalized ad, where would I turn off my ad block, and go?

Yeah, but as I say, I keep having to turn ad-block back off again, usually it's because some site demands I do so to let me see it. Last time it was that Firefox got corrupted somehow and had to be reinstalled and I didn't reinstall ad-block, then started noticing all those creepy "personalised" ads ("people living in [area the telephone exchange I'm routed through, presumably] are all buying [product I don't care about]'

There's also the tediousness of having to make sure I'm signed out of Gmail before I use any other site. These corporations are all stalkers, basically. If an actual identifiable human behaved as they do they'd be socially-shunned, if not arrested.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I especially enjoy seeing ads for stuff pop up that I've only talked about in-range of my phone but never actually searched for....

Yeah... me too.

 

[pete6032]

I can't remember the last ad I saw. Aside from a couple forums that use static ads by sponsors(cool by me). I haven't seen an ad in almost 20 years. If I wanted to see a personalized ad, where would I turn off my ad block, and go?

Have you watched a YouTube video recently?

 

[mindless1]

There are a lot of directions I could go with a reply, but don't wish to write pages.

You can completely block google tracking, except for certain google services. Yes, through browser add-on, or a firewall, or even a windows hosts file.

However, if you set aside the idea of whether you are comfortable with them tracking to serve targeted ads, the more they can ID you the more appropriate the ads are to something you'd be interested in.

At the same time let's look at your examples. It will be high priced gear that gets advertised in a community about electronics. That's the pool of companies that want to advertise there, rather than say, a yogurt manufacturer.

Same thing for a right wing site and clothing targeted towards extremeists. It's not so much google tracking you as it is advertising dept. of a seller, targeting that site whether google is the medium to do it or not. Besides, it would still be strange to see an ad for yogurt on those sites.

What is far more creepy is if you do a google search for xyz (not necessarily even a product, rather like "what to do for a tooth ache" and then see ads on other sites (not the google search results) related to products for tooth aches, especially if you searched on a desktop PC then see the ads on your phone or another device instead of the same browser session you used to do the search.

 

[mindless1]

Have you watched a YouTube video recently?

I watch youtube all the time, and the only ads I see are those embedded in the video meaning the person in the video pauses for a moment to pimp their sponsor or their merch.

That's unless I fire up a *clean* browser that blocks nothing, then bombarded with those damn solar panel ads. I can forgive some older videos having those since youtube changed their ad policy to require content creators to go back and change settings from the defaults on every single video (those bassturds!) but for newer videos where the creator hasn't been setting ads off, they don't realize how much referral links (referral just meaning a link to their content not any conspiracy for monetary gain) I wouldn't have given them if I realized they did that because/if I didn't block the ads.

I see it as a bubble. # of content creators continues to grow but society has a finite limit on spending and effectiveness of advertising expenditure. Some companies blow up in sales from it but many more didn't get a return on investment.

Then again if you're google, once you amass enough money to operate off the interest on what you already have, it's less risky to experiment.

 

[mindless1]

[edit] My post contained info that could potentially be used to help a site force more ads you're trying to block so that content has been removed[/edit].

 

[Red Squirrel]

It really is freaky just how much we are constantly being watched. It seems even using privacy extensions like ad blockers, privacy badger etc is not 100%. Any time I happen to land on a machine where I don't have an ad blocker (ex: a VM I just setup) I will immediately start seeing ads that are very relevant to my activities. Even physical purchases. Like if I buy something at a physical store I will see ads based on that. Everybody including credit card companies, retailers, government etc just shares our info with each other, it's crazy. We live in a surveillance state dystopia and they're constantly pushing to go further and further. Digital ID and cashless society is the next big thing I think.

 

[pmv]

It will be high priced gear that gets advertised in a community about electronics. That's the pool of companies that want to advertise there, rather than say, a yogurt manufacturer.

Same thing for a right wing site and clothing targeted towards extremeists. It's not so much google tracking you as it is advertising dept. of a seller, targeting that site whether google is the medium to do it or not. Besides, it would still be strange to see an ad for yogurt on those sites.

Yeah, I didn't make it clear, but the point is I then see those ads not on those sites themselves, but on _other_ sites, where they are using Google as an ad-provider. Seems they (somehow) know I visited the conservative site so lazily conclude I must be amenable to buying a t-shirt with "let's go brandon" on it. I dunno, I just find myself repeatedly drawn to trying to work out why they think certain ads are appropriate, which is in itself annoyingly distracting.

I could probably be more consistent about blocking cookies. I get tired of being asked about them, generally just clear them all out every now and then.

 

[pmv]

As far as YouTube goes, the moment where it really annoyed me was when it dawned on me they weren't tracking your YouTube viewing (just) with cookies, or if you had an account and logged in, but they were simply keeping track of your IP address. That felt like crossing a line to me.

 

[pmv]

However, if you set aside the idea of whether you are comfortable with them tracking to serve targeted ads, the more they can ID you the more appropriate the ads are to something you'd be interested in.

Missed this bit before. My point is partly just that, for all their creepy stalking, they fail dismally at ever advertising anything I'd be interested in. They consistently get it wrong, which somehow is even worse than if they got it right - it just leaves the naked evidence of their stalking behaviour, with no distracting useful content!

Oh, and I gave up on script-blockers, because having, for every new site, to spend ages experimenting to work out which couple of the hundred of obscurely-named scripts were actually necessariy for the site to work at all, got very tedious very fast.

 

[lxskllr]

I could probably be more consistent about blocking cookies. I get tired of being asked about them, generally just clear them all out every now and then.

Block 3rd party cookies always, use an addon like CookieAutoDelete to purge cookies on tab close. Keep cookies you want via whitelist.

 

[BUTCH1]

Block 3rd party cookies always, use an addon like CookieAutoDelete to purge cookies on tab close. Keep cookies you want via whitelist.

Not a bad idea, seems like every site I go to these days has a cookies accept button to view the page.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I always block 3rd party cookies too.

What I hate though is there seems to be some sites that for whatever reason constantly log me out, it's so freaking annoying. Firefox seems to have changed something with the way it remembers passwords too, instead of just auto filling you have to pick from a list. For sites that are javascript heavy and don't use normal form fields it also does not work. I tend to use randomly generated passwords so I don't remember any of them and always have to end up opening my password manager to log back in. There are some forums I've basically stopped posting at since it was just annoying having to login each time.

 

[lxskllr]

Not a bad idea, seems like every site I go to these days has a cookies accept button to view the page.

I don't care about cookies

Get rid of cookie warnings from almost all websites!

www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu

You can use the addon, or a filter list for your adblocker. I use the filter list.

 

[cytg111]

I especially enjoy seeing ads for stuff pop up that I've only talked about in-range of my phone but never actually searched for....

That is at least in part because you have been in proximity of a person, to the degree that they figure you could have had an conversation, that HAS done the actual activity around that type of product. So ads are like a virus in that way.

 

[13Gigatons]

This thread is being tracked by Google.

 

[pmv]

This thread is being tracked by Google.

Well, since posting in the thread about wearing glasses I started getting adverts for glasses. Which gets me wondering 'is that because they scanned keywords in that thread, or is it simply because Google knows how old I am?'. I hate that it gets me wondering things like that. Now those ads have gone and I'm getting adverts for...bulk automatic watch winders? What the heck does that imply that Google thinks about me? What demographic buys devices to wind multiple watches at a time?

I presume now I'll start seeing adverts for ad-blockers.

 

[pmv]

Block 3rd party cookies always, use an addon like CookieAutoDelete to purge cookies on tab close. Keep cookies you want via whitelist.

As far as cookies go, I'm talking about what I guess is the EU GDPR thing, which means every site I go to presents me with a tedious questionnaire about what cookies I will accept (though some US sites still just can't be bothered and instead just block everyone they think is in the EU - even if your country has since left!).

That law doesn't seem to work well at all, because they try and make you go through a long tedious list of slider-buttons, where you have to laboriously accept or decline multiple different 'types' of cookie (and you seem to have to do it all over again each time you visit the site). Eventually you just can't stand it any more and get into the habit of just clicking 'accept all' (rather like scrolling straight to the bottom of EULAs and clicking 'accept'). I think Firefox blocks 3rd party cookies by default, but I still seem to need to periodically clear all the cookies out, like periodically clearing all the dust from my computer case despite the fan filters.

 

[mindless1]

Yeah I don't get a tedious list of sliders for cookies but it is/was annoying to constantly get that cookie policy/accept popup at the bottom of pages.

I use a browser element hiding helper to select and hide those, and if it has the word cookie in it, I make it global. Many sites just copy and paste the code to implement them, so at first it may seem like it's tedious to do on every site but when you can do one block and it starts blocking multiple sites, it gets less and less tedious to add the outliers less often.

 

[Captante]

About your privacy sir? I'm afraid that was only a rumor!

 

[Stiff Clamp]

I now view suggestions or recommendations by FB or YT as representing what the site thinks of me. And then I ponder where it got that particular idea. Now and then I'll roll my eyes or get offended.

Best way to combat is post/click stuff you don't care about . . . i.e. disinformation.

 

[Shmee]

Use a good adblocker.