Post #3090673
2026-06-03 18:04 UTC
Replies (16)
-
@heathen_cat@furs.social 2026-06-03 18:22
@kaye@cathode.church The damnedest thing is, I get absolutely no relevant ads, but through all the tracking my housemates get ads relevant to me. Makeup, perfume, plus size clothes, "lady stuff". They know who I'm with but not how to get to me.
-
@VoxSomniator@chitter.xyz 2026-06-03 18:28
@kaye@cathode.church You are, as far as I know, pretty much correct. https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/25/lying-spies/#spying-liars "Hwang's book documents lots more ad-tech fraud that's every bit as audacious as the Wannamaker-era con-jobs. For example, there's the fact that when Procter and Gamble zeroed out its $200m/year surveillance advertising program, they saw a zero percent drop in sales because (to a first approximation) all $200m of that annual spend was disappearing down the fraud-hole."
-
@kaye@cathode.church 2026-06-03 19:55
@maxoakland@mastodon.social Yeah, same. I don't have the hard data to support that hunch (hence why it's a tinfoil hat theory), but it's something I'd love to see investigated.
-
@Qybat@batchats.net 2026-06-03 19:45
@kaye@cathode.church It may be a different matter on sites which have a much wider audience. General news sites, social media, shopping. There's no clearly-defined demographic for those, so more personally targeted advertising would have an apparent advantage.
-
@Draconic_NEO@pawb.fun 2026-06-04 00:31
@kaye@cathode.church There was a college humor sketch about this a few years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM Yeah, the flaw with targeted advertisement is that it very often recommends things based on the things people already bought. Which means, they often don't need those things that they already bought. I feel like a lot of companies tend to do it, mainly because the logical decision-making processes that would lead individual people to see how this isn't working, are suppressed in the corporate world. As well as just not expressed, because the people whose job it would be to express those concerns benefit from doing things in a dysfunctional way. They may not have a job if the company was more functional.
-
@ghosttie@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-06-04 00:40
@kaye@cathode.church I just got a terrible "inspired by your browsing history" ad from Amazon and I was thinking - if they just asked me "do you like this product?" a few times it would be 100% more successful and they wouldn't have to spy on me
-
@Primo@donphan.social 2026-06-04 01:26
@kaye@cathode.church another dimension is people getting uncomfortable with perceiving an ad to be personalized and therefore rejecting it's contents. At least I personally react that way.
-
@monokeros@tech.lgbt 2026-06-04 01:51
@kaye@cathode.church I have seen lots of data on this, having once worked in the field, and I agree. If any kind of advertising works at all, it's informational. You have a product. People want your product but don't know it exists. You tell them. They buy it. Personalized ads are useless at best and a literal scam (in Google's case) at worst.
-
@miss_rodent@girlcock.club 2026-06-04 02:12
@kaye@cathode.church It doesn't have to get more sales - the money is in the mass surveillance at a historically-unthinkable scale (data which is bought and sold), and the con of selling your ad services to clients who don't know - and often have no really good way to tell - that your service is not actually helping.
-
@gemelen@mammut.moe 2026-06-04 04:05
@kaye@cathode.church From my knowledge in adtech there were and likely there is no truly personalised ad as in "this is shown specifically to you and only you based on your data". In adtech there are two stages - data collection and ad auction. All the data collected about you is still a data point in a dataset in the hands; while the bidders for the fact of showing an ad don't hold this data, they only bid for it to be shown to some audience, not to a particular person, and this match of you into a set from which the ad audience consists is depersonalized for the bidder and probabilistic (not out of a good will, but to decrease computational cost). Technically, it is possible to identify a person based on all data collected about them, but the buying side doesn't know you and don't care about you in particular. Their activities (ad campaigns) work with your profile characteristics.
-
@jaxter184@social.linux.pizza 2026-06-04 04:26
@kaye@cathode.church there's a book called Subprime Attention Crisis that i think is sorta related to this
-
@buherator@infosec.place 2026-06-04 06:34
@kaye@cathode.church My favorite articles in the topic: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising https://thecorrespondent.com/125/the-non-sense-of-online-advertising-when-the-numbers-dont-add-up
-
@chaosthief@mastoart.social 2026-06-04 07:32
@kaye@cathode.church It's a scam, but to get the broad categorisations, they use the same tech, so it just goes further. Social media is the biggest offender in this, since it's for "everybody" they need data groups. A lot of it boils down to one side wanting convenience, and the other wanting to make money with "better" service. My tinfoil hat theory is that all the metrics on ad platforms are massivly inflated (especially meta)
-
@emily_s@mastodon.me.uk 2026-06-04 07:36
@kaye@cathode.church my extra layers of tin foil is that these ad profiles are a fucking delight to the American three letter agencies. Lots of current product decisions make more sense when one asks "what would make the NSA's life easier when implementing this feature"
-
@Rycochet@furs.social 2026-06-04 08:27
@kaye@cathode.church The selling point for a lot of horrible ideas produced by modern tech companies is that they sound like they should work to people with MBAs and marketing degrees, people who care about the potential for massive, cancerous growth rather than something proven to work at a steady rate, and aren't bothered by things not working as well as the thing they replaced as long as they're seen to be on board with 'innovation'. It's the same hell that brought us video adverts and the disastrous pivot to video based on Facebook telling lies that killed so many websites.
-
@maxoakland@mastodon.social 2026-06-03 19:45
@kaye@cathode.church Interesting. I'd like to see some studies