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Comment by brad0 | Hacker News Reader

> "At work, happened to me though earlier this year. Working as a barista, got a burn, talked to my partner in person about it, went to Target, bought the burn cream, and saw an ad on FB for the exact product I purchased. Never searched for product either," wrote Brigitte Bonasoro.

Facebook has data sharing agreements with many, many companies. It's most likely that the cream was bought with a card then linked together with your facebook profile. It's not that hard, especially when you use the same email identifier for all those loyalty cards you have.

EDIT

A video that explains what Facebook does https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...

View on HN

I have a similar anecdote. Girlfriend was having some symptoms, we briefly talked about it then walked to the pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test. Maybe 30 minutes after purchasing the test we watched a youtube video on her phone. The ad on the video was for the exact test we bought.

I figured that youtube got the credit card info from the purchase but I was shocked at how quickly that translated into something showing on the screen. I've always thought about these things in the back of my mind but this was still eye opening for me.

I'd never had it happen to me personally since I aggressively block all ads :)

It's certainly a technical possibility but my bets are on your girlfriend's recent searches. Was the yt video on anything to do with being pregnant?

Was the pharmacy a national chain, regional, local, or one-off?

In my experience in data exchanges with other large companies, data is usually shared and processed in batches where even an hour lag would be considered "very quick".

It's possible she had done some searches before talking to me, I'm not sure. The video was unrelated though. National chain pharmacy so they certainly have some kind of data sharing scheme.

> National chain pharmacy so they certainly have some kind of data sharing scheme.

I don't know if you can say that for sure or not.

Regardless of whom shares customer data with whom, this whole issue has a number of legal/compliance issues beginning with HIPAA. The pregnancy test purchase, when anonymized, is just a sales data point, sure. When combined with identifying your girlfriend, and then giving that data to a third party (especially for non health-care treatment or paying claims needs), is most certainly illegal. If she had purchased a Coke, then no, but given she purchased a health-related product it falls into a myriad of laws that govern health care privacy.

> I have a similar anecdote. Girlfriend was having some symptoms, we briefly talked about it then walked to the pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test.

The funny thing is, this is a horrible use of ad data. With a few exceptions (luxury cars being one, making someone feel good about their purchase) showing ads for a product someone just bought is the height of uselessness.

Advertisers are suckers.

Facebook and YouTube are selling ads to people who have already bought their product.

In a sense, they are suckers. Plus, as another story on HN suggested, their abandonment of advertising you things you don't need right now(but you may find you want later in life) proves counterproductive. A heck of a lot of things advertised to me on Facebook are things I already searched for and either purchased or already decided wasn't worth buying. I don't believe that modern internet ads are as valuable as the industry seems to think, which may be a sign of an impending bubble burst.

Internet ads are far more measurable than most other forms of advertising.

The advertiser certainly has all the data necessary to see if it's profitable or not to do those seemingly counterintuitive ad campaigns.

except the data is controlled by the entity selling you the ad, so they have reasons to make the profitablity difficult to discern

But still, when you advertise X to people who searched for X' (or even X itself), you can see the conversion rates of those ads, right? And you should be able to measure if that setup is profitable or not.

im bombarded with ads for Ecwid. a product i purchased and have used for 5 years. I feel bad, they must have spent more on ads than I actually pay them.

Credit card information is not tied to the products that are purchased. It is an aggregate purchase amount tied to a store location, that is it. Whatever is going on here needs to be investigated and brought to light.

Do credit card companies get the list of items you purchased, not just amount and the place?

No, they do not not. I have access to many billions of credit card transactions. Aggregate amount, date/time, maybe merchant location, merchant name, and a merchant classification--plus some other things but not much that is interesting.

Depends on which country you are in. Your bank card in some European countries is not allowed to receive or store info about the items you purchased, but the shop obviously will and there is a limit on what they can do with that info and for how long they can store it.

So if I pay for petrol with a card and also buy donuts and coffee the bank and the shop cannot market to me according to what I bought, but if I join a loyalty card scheme then I'm opting in and the shop can, but not the bank.

In Norway btw, where govt. are strict about this sort of thing.

Or it's coincidence? How many ads does Facebook show to how many people? It would be weird if zero of them were relevant.

This. With billion users being shown ads daily, coincidences are just bound to happen.

I don't see how it's beneficial to the advertiser when the person has already bought the product before they've seen the ad?

It sounds like someone is trying to game the advertiser by correlating ad views with sales.

> It sounds like someone is trying to game the advertiser by correlating ad views with sales.

Shhh. If advertisers realize how utterly wasted most of their advertising spending is you'll destroy about 80% of "tech" companies and plunge the world into a global recession.

Or maybe you're wrong about how useful advertising is?

(Is it really easier to believe that we, the "smart techies" of HN, just know so much more and can see so much more clearly than everyone else?)

To be fair, coke can't get many new customers buying their product. Yet they spend quite a bit of money advertising their product so that their existing users keep purchasing.

For example in the Automotive industry a mail piece with a tracked phone number is used and that is cross referenced with Dealer sales data. The pieces are mailed to targeted lists of people qualified by credit score, postal code and recent purchase of vehicle make. Should the site be accessed via a personalized URL the user now appears through a variety of methods, same if they come from FB they’re claimed through offline conversions where sales data is compared to audiences. Using this readily sold and available data it’s easy to calculate spend and determine response. Even with single digit response (not uncommon for email) industries thrive.

These ads also help in talking to you unconsciously, the next time a person is looking for a burn cream, its the company's product whose ad you saw will be the first thing that comes to your mind.

Alternatively they might be so freaked out by the surveillance aspect that they decide never to buy that brand again.

reinforce the quality of the product to make the buyer feel good purchasing again? odds are if someone's of a certain age/relationship status and buying a pregnancy test, they're trying to conceive and will possibly buy more.

Not all ads have to be relevant to be valuable. Especially when you're still training the AI.

Not sure if this is better or worse.

Agreed and I am not sure the majority of population realize this or would be accepting of it.

Well, I'm (marginally) more comfortable with a company like Facebook having this data compared to... Equifax

Why? FB has agency to actually do something, probably horrible with it. Equifax would just get hacked.

Don't forget the sell out when they finally jump the shark.

Would you still be comfortable with it if Zuckerberg was running for president?

What ways do you think they company might be able to use that information to sway the outcome of the election (passively or actively), and do you think there is a greater than zero chance they would try to do this?

I'll sometimes see ads for products I bought at Costco, so that makes sense. But then again I get a lot of ads I don't understand -- Facebook has me pegged for a drug addict considering divorce who loves Urdu-language television, but where it came up with those ideas I don't know.

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