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Comment by null0pointer | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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.

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