What Doggy Diapers Revealed About Facebook's Marketing Algorithms
Did that thumbnail of weird panties get your attention?
It certainly creeped out a few of our friends.
Here's what happened: Our poor, geriatric Italian Greyhound recently celebrated her 18th birthday. She's almost completely deaf and mostly blind, but she's got strong legs and a heart that won't quit. She can find her way around the house without a problem, and in the Summer, she's able to make her way outside to bask in the sun for a while, and then find her way back in all on her own.
What she can't do so well these days is control her bladder and bowels.
So The Wife did some research on doggy diapers. She did a few searches online, but never placed an order. Instead she went to the local superstore and picked up a couple of brands. (It turns out that regular disposable baby diapers are much easier to use with our shape of dog. They're a hell of a lot cheaper too.)
The Wife used her own computer for this research. Even though I never entered the term "dog diaper" into my own machine, advertisements for these things started popping up in my Facebook feed. That was weird and kind of creepy. But I figured it was to be expected in this day and age, since we share an internet account with the same public IP address. It's not much of a stretch to assume that Comcast is selling our search data to advertisers so they can bombard members of the same household with relevant advertising. If a kid is searching for a toy, for example, it makes sense that they'd want to advertise that toy to his parents.
But in reality it seems that this information sharing is more global than that. Somehow the search data is getting sold to Facebook, then linked to the Facebook user at that IP address, and then canvassed out to entire networks of Facebook friends!
Normally we wouldn't know this was happening. I see lots of products in my feed that aren't of interest to me. It never occurred to me that they were there because my friends might have bought them. After all, I don't get to see what they see coming up in their feed. As far as I know they could be getting bombarded with ads for pipe tobacco and typewriter ribbons as a result of my interests. Unless I stood over their shoulder while they scrolled through their feed, I'd never know.
Fortunately I have a few dirty-minded friends who assumed these were some sort of kinky sex panties, and decided to re-post the ad out of bewilderment. Questions started to roll in, in the comments. "Just what is that hole for? Is the man supposed to wear these, or the woman? What's wrong with old-school crotch-less panties? Does it come with attachments? Why is it covered in yellow ducks? Shouldn't it be black lace or something?"
Not only that, but it became clear that lots of my friends had seen these ads. Once they worked out that it was a product for dogs, and the hole went on the back, for the tail, there were shared sighs of relief. "What the hell? I kept getting that ad, too! I just scrolled past it! I don't even have a dog - why am I seeing this?"
I let the conversation pass without participating. No reason to let them know we were the ones panty-shopping.
It makes sense that advertisers would want to target a group of friends with the assumption they might have similar interests. Clearly in this case their algorithms were off-base. It just makes me wonder - the next time I search for a product online, how many of my friends are going to wind up considering the same product?
This is why it's good to use private browsing any time you can.
How about you? Have you found your product searches cropping up in conversations with your friends? Anything you've bought online that your friends seemed to mysteriously purchase around the same time? And are there any products that might come up in their Facebook feed that would make you say, Who, me? I'm sure I've never seen anything like that before!
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interestng!
LOL! I mostly get dresses and female beauty products. Now thinking about it, there were some fishing stuff too...I dont tend to notice the comercials and since a few days ago I closed my FB acc...so now there wont be any. :P
Good job on shutting down the Facebook. I'd love to do that as well but it's my only connection to a lot of friends. In fact, I was told about Steemit through a Facebook message!
privacy? What's that?
another reason to despise marketing.
Apologies for the wall of text, again, haha, I guess I must have a lot to say on this subject.
I can't talk about Facebook because I stopped using it a good three or four years ago. One little anecdote I do have is when I was at a friend's house recently. I was asking him if he'd seen some thing, I can't remember what exactly, but his answer was, "No, but say it again louder and I'll have an add for it on Facebook tomorrow."
I laughed at that because a year or two earlier I was telling my friends about how the Facebook app on smartphones is listening to your conversations to "better target advertisements". At the time my friends laughed it off as just another silly conspiracy theory. But, after a little internal told-you-so moment, I started asking him about it and he said that he definitely noticed topics of conversation showing up in his advertisements a short time later.
Here's an interesting recent article with a somewhat ominous headline from Forbes on the topic.
I try as often as possible to remove any targeted advertising from my digital space. I've come across pages like this one http://www.youronlinechoices.com/ie/your-ad-choices where you can see and turn off the companies targeting you with advertisements. It seems to be a temporary fix because I have to check back every so often to see what companies have started targeting me again, haha. I did notice a difference in the ads I was seeing the first time I did this. In fact, one of the new ads was so odd I had to take a screenshot of it:
The company's slogan is the best: "A World of Special Balls."
You see, you just don't get comedy like that with targeted advertisements.
Good luck with your dog. I hope she has a few more years of health and happiness. I have an elderly dog of my own, I think he's somewhere between 13 and 16 years old now and hasn't been in the best of shape the last year or two.
Thanks for the helpful links.
The speech analysis stuff is especially creepy - something that would have seemed absurd a couple of years ago that's now quite possible. I know that when I had to renew my cable contract and wanted only internet (no TV), they gave me a better deal for a package that included TV...and then sent me a remote control with voice search and activation. Why the hell would I want that? In any case the Cable box sits in a closet, unplugged and unused, because we stream everything anyway.
I'd happily ditch Facebook if all of my friends weren't on there. In time, maybe.
Sophie the dog just might outlive all of us. We're unwilling to "put her to sleep" while she still feels comfortable and happy. Best of luck with your dog as well.
Haha, yeah, keeping in touch with people without Facebook, or a phone, can be quite a challenge.
Cute poochie dog! Facebook is creepy.