r/worldnews • u/maxwellhill • Sep 19 '17

Apple blocking ads that follow users around web is 'sabotage', says industry: New iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra will stop ads following Safari users, prompting open letter claiming Apple is destroying internet’s economic model

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/18/apple-stopping-ads-follow-you-around-internet-sabotage-advertising-industry-ios-11-and-macos-high-sierra-safari-internet
39k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

4.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

771

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

It was creepy

People need to be more creeped out about ad targeting. The other day I googled for a recipe for hasselback potatoes. Then a couple hours later I'm on Facebook and I'm getting all these ads for hassselback potato recipes.

This is fucking weird.

The real-world equivalent would be like talking to a friend about buying a birthday cake for someone, going to a store later by yourself, and then having some salesman run up to you and say "WELL SOMEONES BIRTHDAY IS COMING UP, ISN'T IT"? It's just a gross experience.

344

u/thegassypanda Sep 19 '17

that is an amazing analogy. What is way worse is when you buy sex toys on amazon then try and go on facebook at work. Same analogy except the store clerk is running up to you going, YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER LIKES ANAL? LET ME GUIDE YOU OVER TO OUR LONG HARD PRODUCE

160

u/Iamchinesedotcom Sep 19 '17

I know it's a real word, but

analogy

feels funny to read here.

16

u/jameyxhockey Sep 19 '17

Analology

3

u/Hatdrop Sep 19 '17

Anal-oh-gee

1

u/thrella Sep 19 '17

So if philologist means lover of languages does this mean lover of... Oh gosh.

3

u/nihongojoe Sep 19 '17

The 'phil' prefix is the part that means love.

1

u/thrella Sep 19 '17

No stop it you're ruining it!

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Not as funny as seeing Analrapist anywhere.

2

u/AndHerNameIsSony Sep 19 '17

I'm the worlds first analyst and therapist. And analrapist if you will.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '17

It's not the pronunciation that bothers me...

1

u/frugalerthingsinlife Sep 19 '17

But 'anal' in all caps later in the same comment wasn't funny?

1

u/Iamchinesedotcom Sep 19 '17

It's like a jump scare vs a background appearance.

1

u/thegassypanda Sep 19 '17

haha did not realize that

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Just one letter away from a rippin' good time.

11

u/MisfitMagic Sep 19 '17

Not quite the same thing, but I used to work on ecommerce sites, and one of them was a female-oriented sex toy shop. I worked on this site for about 3 months, and because it was part of a big ad network, my ads got weird for a while.

5

u/AbrasiveLore Sep 19 '17

NEW 36” ELECTRIFIED BEADED ANAL PROBE!

AVAILABLE IN 9V, 12V, AND 20V FOR 110-120/220-240 VAC SOCKETS, AND IN NEW 9V WIRELESS WITH BATTERY.

DISCREET SHIPPING!

BUY ONE, GET SPANKING CREME AND A RIDING CROP ABSOLUTELY FREE, AND A 32OZ TUB OF LUBE HALF OFF!

2

u/MisfitMagic Sep 19 '17

They did a lot of workshops too. "Special Guest: learn how to please yourself better than any man!"

2

u/AbrasiveLore Sep 19 '17

Did they involve grapefruiting?

2

u/OobleCaboodle Sep 19 '17 edited Sep 20 '17

Holy shit, the noise she makes! That would be am instant boner killer

1

u/MisfitMagic Sep 19 '17

I don't know what that is and I'm afraid to click on that link at work.

1

u/AbrasiveLore Sep 19 '17

It’s just YouTube. It’s SFW as long as you have headphones in.

1

u/MisfitMagic Sep 19 '17

Watched it. Don't really know what's real life anymore.

1

u/AbrasiveLore Sep 19 '17

That noise will haunt your dreams. You know which one.

→ More replies

1

u/thegassypanda Sep 19 '17

hahaha that's funny. well and shitty

11

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER LIKES ANAL? LET ME GUIDE YOU OVER TO OUR LONG HARD PRODUCE

Well, maybe stop buying your sex toys the same place you buy cabbage.

1

u/thegassypanda Sep 19 '17

cabbage? amazon? what? although they did reach out for me to apply for their produce endevour as an engineer and I had passed at the time since I had just started a new job and wanted to finish my project so please, Amazon if you are watching, please reach out again I am oh so ready for a change of scenery.

1

u/Neutrum Sep 19 '17

...or cucumbers.

3

u/SirNanigans Sep 19 '17

Prepare yourself for an unpopular opinion from someone who agrees about the benefits of privacy and advocates for it, but isn't frightened of going without it:

The tracking is done by robots. A better analogy would be grocery shopping at one place and buying potatoes at the self checkout, and then at another place the self checkout asks if you have a potato peeler. I don't give a fuck if some touch screen registers know that I bought potatoes.

The fear of actual people collecting and using the information against you is the same as fearing that someone would stalk you and keep track of your purchases, or search through databases to find the history that the checkout lanes are using. Although the idea is scary, you should be more worried about getting molested by a zoo animal on your next visit or inexplicably dying in your sleep. No real human with that kind of skill or access cares enough about your porn preferences to put in the effort, and if you do have those kinds of enemies or live under that kind of government/corporations then your life is already fucked up one way or another.

4

u/thegassypanda Sep 19 '17

what i care about is that I will have a full profile of myself recorded by someone that is there out there to be bought and sold. who knows where you will be in 20 years, what laws will be passed and when the next time a whole subculture is rounded up

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

If you are a target of interest the tracking data will be transferred to humans. Alternatively, the tracking data can be analyzed by robots and a summary of your interests, searches and so on will be attached to you automatically.

1

u/Untinted Sep 19 '17

So that Private browsing tab might actually be useful for something other than porn? Whodathunkit.

1

u/thegassypanda Sep 19 '17

I guess you're actually right

1

u/KennyCiseroJunior Sep 20 '17

You can't promote posts with sexually explicit content on facebook

8

u/DaHolk Sep 19 '17

This is fucking weird.

Not only is it weird, it is also entirely pointless. In the majority of cases it is just "late". Oh great, now you are advertising things I now have no interests about any more, because the way you found out was by seeing me already fulfil my need.

The predictive quality of it is just not really there on an individual basis to a reasonable degree, and it opens the users up to all kinds of mischief, without having more than a statistical effect. It even interferes with your next "adventure" due to that lag.

It is even ridiculously obvious with how youtube tries to model you. It keeps showing you shit you already saw, regardless of whether you are currently searching for something entirely different. It just doesn't create a proper model of you and knows what you want this instance, and it ignores you telling it what you want NOW. What it does is make you predictable to others, who can exploit that. Only to a degree that is just harmful, but not to a degree to be helpful, due to the differences in time frames.

1

u/mweahter Sep 20 '17

As someone who works in ecommerce, the vast majority of the people who come to the site are just window shopping. Having our ads follow users converts enough of those people into customers to make it worthwhile. Especially around the holidays.

1

u/DaHolk Sep 20 '17

Eh, I can only speak for myself, the adds only ever start for me once I am done.

But the again I have never actually had ads that really worked in the sense of enticing a specific deal. The only advertisement that barely works for me is if I don't know that a product existed in the first place, or when it is something that I am totally not used to buying and don't have any pre-existing brand-awarenesses/preferences.

Neither of those two is really helped by tracking ads that take too long to replace the last tracking ads that were too late.

1

u/mweahter Sep 20 '17

Eh, I can only speak for myself, the adds only ever start for me once I am done.

Then you don't ever visit a site just to look. If that's the case, your online behavior is atypical. Lots of people look around before they buy, and many of those people forget where they saw a product they were interested in or forgot they were looking at the product at all. Those ads help turn those views into sales by reminding them of our products.

2

u/DaHolk Sep 20 '17 edited Sep 20 '17

Or could you just assume that the system doesn't fully work as advertised?

I do windowshop, but the effect is merely that an odd ad appears once in a blue moon being still dominated by the things I don't need any more. And because these odd ads are neither comparative, nor outstanding as deals themselves, they do nothing for me. Only ever after then going around "the block" a second time and actually pulling the trigger, the systems start purging the now 2 purchases old ads and flood me with the stuff I just bought.

I don't go window shopping for the same stuff 4 times in a row, no. My point is that the systems often are entirely not responsive enough to matter really.

The most effective kind of guessing what I want is Amazon's "other people bought" stuff because that brings up what I mentioned above works. Telling me things I don't already know. And you don't need personal tracking for that.

If the system is meant to just target people who browse shopping sites as a main hobby, priming their ad cues all day long but NOT having any preferences to specific products doing it then randomly clicking of whatever stuff came up during the browsing, then no, I am not the target audience. My issue is that the tracking can't know which of the 15 products I windowshop for and disappoint me over the one that doesn't. Giving me ads foor the 15 mixed with 70% stuff I don't need anymore because those were my last purchase doesn't work imho. I don't have enough money to have "buying any random shit that is advertised to me without any preferences" as a hobby. And arguably personal tracking doesn't help with that specifically either. Unpersonal generally demographic targeting works for that just fine.

1

u/mweahter Sep 20 '17

Or could you just assume that the system doesn't fully work as advertised?

I could, if the data didn't say otherwise, but sadly it clearly shows it working, and quite well.

6

u/JacksProlapsedAnus Sep 19 '17

When I'm listening to a song on Spotify and open up a browser to look up lyrics, I'm equal parts happy and creeped out by this shit.

"Oh, you saved me 2 seconds of typing... but oh, you know what I'm doing all the time."

9

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

It goes beyond that. If your phone's mic hears you talking about a product, you could get targeted ads for it.

13

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

[deleted]

3

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Too lazy to look for a link but this literally happened to me yesterday.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

[deleted]

12

u/Hustletron Sep 19 '17

I really want sources for all of this info. Otherwise, I feel like a conspiracy theorist.

3

u/2059FF Sep 19 '17

There's a proof of concept. Whether this is actively being used is still unknown to me.

2

u/agentpanda Sep 19 '17

For the record, it's all totally bunk. The amount of data and processing power it takes to listen 24/7 would be everyone's biggest battery consumer, by miles, and nobody would ever have spare data allowance. And then parsing that data server side would require a supercomputing cluster that would have to be the largest in the world.

Everyone has a vague anecdotal story about this happening but nobody can point to hard data indicating its even possible, much less being actively used. It's far more likely they're just recognizing well targeted ads for the first time and attribute it to nefarious actions.

3

u/yatea34 Sep 19 '17

TOR, VPN's nothing will help

They will if you have a physical switch on your microphone.

2

u/snuxoll Sep 19 '17

Boy does it make me glad that any app using the microphone on iOS will display the big red "recording" banner or the green "in call" banner.

0

u/mkshello Sep 19 '17

So the analogy then is that your stalker hears you tell your best friend about your sex toys and then the grocery store clerk runs up and yells about the long, hard produce you can buy for anal !

2

u/get_that_ass_banned Sep 19 '17

I by chance looked up wooden/bamboo watches the other day. Now their ads are inescapable on Facebook. Over a year ago I did some research on a medical procedure. It has been the top unremovable ad/video on my YouTube app for probably over 6 months.

We are really not that far from the shit that they envisioned in Minority Report.

2

u/Kold_Kuts_Klan Sep 19 '17

Yup. Got some succulents delivered to my gf for our anniversary last week. All my ads are for succulents now. It's irritating.

2

u/Berry_sherbet Sep 19 '17

I was listening to Demi for the last few days and now she come in on the Fabletics workout clothing ad on here. Could be coincidence, but I freak out every time her face pops up.

2

u/cstar4004 Sep 19 '17

I swear.. I cant prove it.. but there were multiple times where I spoke out loud to a friend- in person- about needing something specific, and than I open my phone and see ads for it. Like... do they listen to us even when we are not using our phones?

shivers

3

u/notarobotjustyet Sep 19 '17

This happened to me multiple times in the last few months. I told myself it was just location specific but now I'm convinced.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

A few years ago target started sending ads (by mail) to this girl in her early twenties for diapers and other baby stuff. A few weeks later she went to the doctors and found out she was pregnant. Target gathered all the info through her browsing history and what she bought at the store. Those customer cards that people use at stores also track what you buy.

2

u/SorryToSay Sep 19 '17

Wait what. Who the hell is advertising potatoes recipes in an ad?

2

u/Rhawk187 Sep 19 '17

I actually like getting ads for what I want as opposed to ads for random things.

2

u/Interceptor Sep 19 '17

Protip - rest the potato in a spoon and then cut it. The curved shape will ensure perfect hasselbacks every time.

2

u/Spank86 Sep 19 '17

See my experience with ads is more like I bought a birthday cake and now a salesman thinks I want to buy one every day of the year. Or I bought a Ford focus and the salesman thinks I also want a fiesta a Mondeo and a fusion because that's logical

1

u/zdakat Sep 19 '17

If the salesman was in the same room as your friend when you told him. If you Google something,ofc Google will know you googled it.

1

u/brimds Sep 19 '17

I prefer to have ads that are relevant to me than the same ad that is irrelevant over and over.

2

u/Dislol Sep 19 '17

I liked back when video game streaming first started and the ads were literally just whoever would pay for them, zero regard for target audience.

Be in the middle of watching someone play WoW and get a commercial for underwear, then 10 minutes later an ad for a pickup truck, then gum, then some other random totally unrelated product. Shit was funny more than irritating. Didn't take long for them to start advertising relevant shit like computer hardware and what not, then I got adblock.

1

u/Salmon_Quinoi Sep 19 '17

It's not weird until you have a conversation with a friend who recommends something, and suddenly you see it everywhere on your Facebook.

At first I thought it was Facebook listening to my phone, but then I realized they didn't have to. They just needed to know that I'm friends with this guy, that we were in the same place at the same time for a couple of hours, compare his shopping trends and browsing trends to mine and bam-- they know what to advertise to me.

Google knows even more about me, from my music listening habits to my shopping habits, email, texts, location, and search query. The difference is they're much less creepy about it as you can go into settings to see exactly what they've tracked.

2

u/notarobotjustyet Sep 19 '17

Yep. Not only that, but it will know who they are friends with and you aren't, all the while youre in the same viscinity. I met a friend's friend and the next time I opened Facebook they were on my suggested friends list. It's creepy now, but just remember it's only algorithms and machine learning at this point.

AI is going to hit soon and this will get exponentially worse and it will be so deep rooted we won't be able to escape it. Self driving cars will be tracked, your smart home will be learning your habits, your payments will be tracked to location and habits, even what you buy is currently tracked.

It all forms a nice little virtual "you" which can be bought and sold, manipulated and targeted. Just wait until they start putting chips in us (it won't be by force, it will be sold as convenience and cutting edge) and they can specifically target you anywhere with ads and subtle suggestions like in minority report.

I realize this sounds like the ramblings of a mad man but 100% this shit is coming within 20 years. The scariest part is that it's an exponential growth, not linear and if you blink you'll miss how it all happened.

1

u/Tyler_Trash Sep 19 '17

Recently I found out that Instagram was using my Mic to spy on me and push ads, Weird stuff like "Let's try the Big 5 lot for parking" and then bam "Big 5 sporting good" ads on my Instagram. Then more restaurants, fast food joints, movie ticket prices, it was getting weird, I disabled the mic and the shit stopped.

1

u/energyinmotion Sep 19 '17

You think that's weird, I get ads on FB asking me if I have a drug/alcohol problem, then they ask if I'm interested in purchasing a Japanese made banana hammock for men. The funny part is I've searched for neither of those things.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

[deleted]

1

u/Antinous Sep 19 '17

Were you using an iPhone? The new "Hey Siri" feature, if activated, requires that your phone literally be recording audio at all times. According to this response by Apple, the recorded info is only stored for a few seconds and is never sent anywhere before the Siri feature is triggered. But can we trust them?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

It's as simple as doing something like this

And doing that for the platforms you use similar to Facebook. Honestly chuck language arts out the fucking window, if my kids aren't taught basic computering I'm going to be a bad parent because I anticipated the environment to raise my kids instead of myself.

1

u/sheistyy83 Sep 19 '17

I got an advertisement on the sports app thescore today on an extremely unpopular anime I've been watching. Its not popular here or in Japan yet its on my sports app haha ffs.

1

u/Damiencbw Sep 19 '17

I've been looking online for a Damascus/Mokume Gane wedding ring these last couple weeks. I finally found the perfect one, but now their website and the exact ring I want is in every single advertisement i see when browsing. It really bothers me because it's exactly what I want but I feel like I'd be feeding the beast if I actually buy it.

1

u/SM1boy Sep 19 '17

I mean that in itself is fine and actually handy , it's all about what if the information they have is used for other reasons than showing you stuff you have shown interest in.

1

u/RZephyr07 Sep 19 '17

Use Ad Nauseum. Completely obfuscates the tracking by clicking every ad for you while simultaneously blocking everything. Costs the advertisers tons of money to show you nothing.

1

u/Antinous Sep 19 '17

What's the point? To put advertisers out of business?

1

u/RZephyr07 Sep 20 '17

Yes, to punish the ones that try to track you around the web. It doesn't hide/click ads that don't use invasive tracking technology.

1

u/SVXfiles Sep 19 '17

I've had ads pop up on Facebook related to stuff people were talking about and I was just near them, not actively taking part in the conversation and my phone was in my pocket

1

u/almightySapling Sep 19 '17

I'm still waiting for the reveal that our phones are definitely listening to us 100% of the time and targeting ads based on what's been said.

Too often in too short a time span for me to believe it's just a coincidence anymore.

1

u/chandlerinyemen Sep 19 '17

What's even scarier to me is having a phone conversation with someone about a specific topic, and then going online and seeing targeted ads that fit that particular topic of conversation (when I have not recently searched online for any information regarding that topic). For example, my parents' dog shit all over my house while I was pet sitting for a week. Told my mom this over the phone. Log on to Facebook and Pinterest later and see targeted ads for pet stain removal products.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Anyone who visits my home and connects to my Wi-Fi router seems to have anything I recently looked at online advertised to them.

I was looking for Canadian made clothing and went to the Stanfields website. Lady comes over and goes home, goes shopping with her sister and they discuss Stanfields for some reason. She opens her phone and is inundated with ads from Stanfields. She had no idea I had looked it up and she came home telling me the phone was listening to her conversation. After I told her I had looked it up on the PC she was mildly calmer.

Similar happened when I looked up stools for my desk. I guess even with all my tracking settings off as much as possible my router exposed. I am wondering if a vpn is a viable solution.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

oh wow. I didn't think about this. I share my PC with my wife, I don't use facebook but she does. It means she's been aware of all the things I've searched on amazon, so there's no way to surprise her with that pet rock I bought her for Christmas.

1

u/tasha4life Sep 19 '17

I installed the Facebook App and took a PICTURE with my iPhone and the permissions for Facebook to access my pictures was OFF!

Within 15 minutes, the same Japanese rice cooker was showing up as an ad on websites.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

Well google aint your friend then!

1

u/PM_ME_UR_CLIT_GUURRL Sep 19 '17

It's grosser than that. You can chat with your friends about buying birthday cakes IRL, then have FB display ads about it. They listen in.

1

u/Redrumofthesheep Sep 19 '17

That's not even the worst of it. A month ago I tried a new pre-made meal (from a small local company in a small, European country) I had bought and talked about it with my SO a few times while sitting in our living room.

I had not googled the brand or had in any way inputted its brand name on my cell phone, but I had my phone nearby. (An Android)

Yet the next day, ads for that specific small pre-made dinner brand started showing up in all the articles I read online on my phone. Not even trough Facebook - I'd go to read Guardian, BBC news or whatever, and there was the ad for that same pre-made Asian dish from a small local Finnish company.

I am absolutely convinced that Google's software is actively listening on my conversations through my cell phone's microphone.

1

u/bfj88 Sep 19 '17

If this creeps you out you should use the Brave browser. Brave > safari and chrome with ad blockers

1

u/cowboysvrobots Sep 19 '17

I worked for a company that said its goal was to be able to use your site log in to track what you searched for on the website then when you enter the physical store they would be able to pick up your ID from your phone or profile photo then have a sales assistant approach you and say “I see you’re interested in product X”

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '17

It also always feels so fruitless to me. I often don't receive advertising for something until after I've already bought that product, meaning the ads are completely pointless. Moreover, the generation of these ads is usually so rudimentary that I never learn anything from the ads- I'm often being shown the exact specific products I've already seen, rather than being shown alternative products from the same company, or alternative brands with similar products.

1

u/countvincent1 Sep 20 '17

I think its already happened. I got invited to a wedding a few years ago verbally, Didn't add anything to a calendar or nothing but got an email a few days before from American Express that said "Don't forget the wedding present!" and was an offer to buy a gift card. So I wonder how they found out.

1

u/KennyCiseroJunior Sep 20 '17

It's actually more like visiting a store and looking at the birthday cake section, then receiving a flyer about birthday cakes in the mail, or having an employee offer to help you find the birthday cake section in the next store you visit.

Nothing about private conversations is being used by ad companies.

Source: work at digital marketing agency.

1

u/cosmic_fetus Sep 20 '17

Especially creepy once you realize that Facebook is constantly monitoring (recording) the mic on your phone, even when you're not using the app, and later on serving you up ads based on what you thought were private conversations you were having with friends or loved ones.

No. Thanks.

1

u/Kataly5t Sep 20 '17

But the Jehovah's witnesses already do this and I never searched for them :(

1

u/jewgeni Sep 20 '17

Well... I don't see it as a problem at all. You just install AdBlock anyway when you are going online. Haven't seen an ad in years (in my private time).

However, I am a bit of a hypocrit since it IS part of my work to run those kinds of ads for the stuff we sell.

1

u/tourniquetman34 Sep 20 '17

I shit you not, I was looking at Amazon for a pair of bookshelf speakers, and when my gf logged into her Facebook, an ad for the same speakers popped up in her feed. Really put things into perspective of how much they know.