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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Straightforward:

1) Amazon tracked your research and likes to use " ad retargeting" if they see you leave before checking out to remind you to come back and purchase.

3) FB offers advertisers a variety of retargeting means + insanely advanced cross-device tracking. Like a building full of PhD's advanced. Maintaining privacy by logging in from different devices / accounts / etc is a thing of the past if you EVER cross-pollute between browsers / devices / etc the signal is picked up and then compared with browsing behavior etc to get a strong profile. (1)

(1) https://www.facebook.com/business/a/performance-marketing-st...

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But... what about step 2?

> Like a building full of PhD's advanced.

On a more serious note, it's unfortunate that so many smart people use their intelligence to enable this kind of gross technology. It's all about "solving puzzles" rather than making the world a better place. There's gotta be more productive ways to advance your career.

> It's all about "solving puzzles" rather than making the world a better place.

I'd figure it's more about getting paid. Making the world better usually doesn't make anyone money, or at least, costs too much before it starts making anyone money.

Making the world truly better requires us to give up a lot of what gets ingrained into us since childhood. We've made money an ends instead of a means. I'm not making a political statement – this is true of every human society, culture and country today. We should collectively rethink what it means to be a successful human and have a fulfilling life (without abandoning technology and progress.)

What's the end goal of civilization? Are we to just multiply and expand, ad infinitum?

>> It's all about "solving puzzles" rather than making the world a better place.

>I'd figure it's more about getting paid. Making the world better usually doesn't make anyone money, or at least, costs too much before it starts making anyone money.

This. I get paid (a lot) for handling marketing campaigns. I also started a health project this year (would love to work on it fulltime on a 10% payment vs what I make now), but that gets ignored.

The banality of evil. So many engineers just want to make the trains run on time with a better algorithm. Never mind that they cary oil or weapons or the victims of our next genocide. Engrossing technical problems are convenient blinders for inconvenient truths.

But maybe for all of us there is something about what the Germans did that pleases and excites us-something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right-or wrong-set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them. Black serendipity. Maybe we know that under the right set of circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl out And what do you think they would look like? Like mad fuehrers with forelocks and shoe-polish moustaches, heiling all over the place? Like red devils, or demons, or the dragon that floats on its stinking reptile wings?' 'I don't know,' Richler said. 'I think most of them would look like ordinary accountants,' Weiskopf said. 'Little mind-men with graphs and flow-charts and electronic calculators, all ready to start maximizing the kill ratios so that next time we could perhaps kill twenty or thirty millions instead of only seven or eight or twelve.

Excerpt From: King, Stephen. “Different Seasons.”

You can't tell in advance what trains, in general, will carry.

When writing ad targeting code, user surveillance, nuclear missile guidance, VW pollution test circumvention code... you know exactly what is going on.

Not necessarily. I don't know much details about other technologies you have mentioned, but user surveillance has many overlapping technologies with IT security: deep packet inspection, network flows monitoring, white/black listing etc. can be used for both good and evil and switched in-between quite easily. I'm very pro-privacy and sometimes get to work with such technologies, though I emphasize that what I do is strictly for security purpose only.

> deep packet inspection, network flows monitoring, white/black listing

This is usual network security.

At some point someone need to glue together existing devices and software into something that has an obvious use case with ethical implications e.g. the chinese "great firewall".

"Engrossing technical problems are convenient blinders for inconvenient truths."

Where does this take us though? If you build a bridge, how do you know what will go across it? Either we all stop or we accept that not all ethical questions can be resolved by individuals acting alone.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

> it's unfortunate that so many smart people use their intelligence to enable this kind of gross technology

We live in a capitalist society.

It just so happens that this "gross technology" makes advertising insanely profitable for millions of companies (mine included), which makes FB billions, so they'll happily pay really smart people millions to build it. And those smart people will happily accept millions to solve those hard problems.

It's just business. If you can figure out how to better align individual and corporate incentives with making the world a better place, we're all ears.

It's unfortunate, not surprising.

>We live in a capitalist society.

Always a solid cop-out for allowing bad things to continue

Selling stuff is a better business than making the world a better place:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w

I suppose it depends on whether you think that Facebook is a worthwhile product that should be commercially viable, rather than closing. If you do think that, you are making the the world a better place for some values of better and world.

Whatever made you think that tech industry is a beacon symbolizing all the good things about humanity!

>> It's all about "solving puzzles" rather than making the world a better place.

How many people do go into computer engineering with an idea of making the world a better place?

Don't misunderstand me, I'm sure many computer engineers are nice, socially conscious people, but if your primary motivation in life is to make the world a better place through your work, there are many more direct ways to achieve this.

It's telling that the Gates Foundation, which has enormous resources, and which could build, should it so wish, the world's best-funded 'change the world with code' startup, instead chooses to allocate its resources on physical things such as malaria drugs.

I completely agree. I pity those PhD's using their Intellect for increasing Ad revenues to FB rather than creating/using algos to solve the pressing real-world problems - Diseases, Nutrition,Drought predictions,Curb terrorism etc. Are they even motivated by what they are doing..after all money is not everything (I agree FB pays a bomb).

I can understand the feeling, but it might seem wasted but Facebook and Google have actually made it easier for small business to do business by enabling them to get segmented customers more easily by breaking down barriers for entry. 20 years ago one could not as a small company get US or global reach without using a lot of money and it was not easy (possible) to segment either. This again have increased competition and enabled new products an lower prices. The technologies pioneered by Google and Facebook (BigData, NoSql, ML) have again improved other disciplines and fields.

While true, I feel like they shouldn't break down all the barriers. They were helping small business do business before re-targeting. Just giving us an affordable way to get in front of interested prospects was huge.

I love picturing a room full of PhDs developing a crazy complicated algorithmic wonderland. Their celebrations at the complexity and genius of their work probably cut short, when users are targeted with ads telling them to buy something that they just bought.

When human male user "Joe" purchases a women's bath robe 1 week before Mother's day, does he really need ads for women's bath robes for the next month? Of course I know this is nothing to do with the fault of the room full of PhDs.

Courtesy of @kibblesmith on Twitter:

    Amazon is a $250 billion dollar company that reacts to you buying a vacuum by going THIS GUY LOVES BUYING VACUUMS HERE ARE SOME MORE VACUUMS

https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529?la...

Nature abhors an empty vacuum.

This has always bothered me too - guess they focused more on tracking users and building a strong graph rather than actually making good recommendations.

Perhaps the coming A.I.pocalypse™ will give us better predictive suggestion algorithms before turning on us... Or the sentient networks just start recommending really dangerous products to wipe ourselves out with! ;(

Chatting with friends, I've discovered FB are also really, really good at showing me adverts for what other people are buying my chums for Xmas, which is of limited use frankly.

I don't know how much does it have to do with advertisers choosing profiling criteria and profiling itself, but often it feels like ad targeting is actively trying to teach me to ignore the ads.

Not really technical friend gets a smarthpone. We check specs on gsmarena, then check few other phones, read a bit more. Lots of hits over short time. Ad targeting: you must be searching for a smartphone, here get some ads for smartphones! I check various pages over few weeks, compare phones, check availability. Ad targeting: very rare hits, must be accidental.

For the past few weeks I have been selecting a pair of products. Watching youtube, reading various forums, browsing manufacturer pages, browsing stores, comparing prices, usual stuff. A single ad for at least one of those two product categories? Nope, instead I see ads to subscribe to my current carrier.

but is he 0.5% more likely to need a bath robe than [random internet user]?

But sort of silly to be advertising you for something you've already bought? They think maybe you liked the bike so much you'll buy another, but only if you see an ad?

I'm pretty sure I read here on Hacker News that one idea to advertise the exact same product that you just bought (I had that with a basketball I got for my daughter) is that they want you to feel good about the purchase. If you see it in ads after you bought it, you'll start thinking it's a popular product and will feel that your choice to buy is being validated.

And they of course get to repeat the name of the store for you so that you're more likely to think of them the next time you need a related product, even if it's not a basketball. You'll remember that you've seen the name of store X in multiple places, so they must be popular.

tracking you as you browse around is relatively easy, which is what I believe these particular scripts are doing.

To actually track checkouts/purchases correctly so that you don't advertise to those people requires a completely different setup.

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