Brainwashing your wife to want sex? Here is ad tech at its worst | Hacker News Reader

Brainwashing your wife to want sex? Here is ad tech at its worst

thedrum.com

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This is satire, no?

more funny examples: https://www.thespinner.net/packages

e.g. "Message: Get your kid a dog! Target: Mom/Dad".

Do satirical Web sites typically accept payment?

I didn't dig so deep before.

It actually asked for and validated a CC number O_o

it might be real, oh my.

It uses https://www.payplus.co.il/

PayPlus is registered to a media group in Israel that is being sued by the US: https://twitter.com/SWeinglass/status/1021428223136149508

Seems like a satire to me, a joke similar to bonsai kitten.

I'm on the edge. Some of these definitely look like jokes (the "don't do drugs" targeted at athletes is an obvious one) but others are not so obvious. I wonder if it could be that they are serious about the service but they know that they risk some serious backlash so they add the "lighter" ones in order to have plausible deniability? "It's just a prank!"

Take the "Play slots!" one, targeted at "High ARPU existing slot players", that doesn't seem particularly funny to me and it's oddly specific. This is also one that I can actually imagine working if they're somewhat addicted to gambling. But then again, humor is very subjective.

It's hard to tell, isn't it...

If this isn't a joke thats messed up. If your not having the sex life you want with your SO figure out why generally there is something wrong in the relationship and fix it.

Is SO just tired and dead at the end of the day? Help them more, delegate out anything that you can to 3rd party services (not as expensive as you would think).

The obvious one, send the kids somewhere, go out on date.

That all being said. if this real i highly doubt it even works.

I hope this is satire. If not, the fact that anyone could think this a) works, and b) is a good way to get more intimate time with their SO, makes me very sad.

This line from Heavens to Betsy never felt more relevant to me, if this story is true: "You wanna know how I feel? You could never just ask me"

> the fact that anyone could think this [...] is a good way to get more intimate time with their SO, makes me very sad.

This doesn't surprise me at all. There are plenty of rednecks all over the world. There's no point in being sad for them.

This smells of satire maybe even something to spread awareness about tracking and targeted ads. I'm not even sure how this should work and how people would react to seeing so many suggestions I would be confused and annoyed mostly. "Funny" idea nonetheless even thought it wouldn't work for me and my wife (adblocker anyone?). Would be interesting for advertisers how well adds really work.

Anyway in the spirit of this article I will now order naptime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF_nfazQaek

Is it satire if they take your money too?

Fascinating. I don't know if this company's claims are real, the journalist was so offended she didn't do a full test of the service, but aquaintance manipulation by way of surveillance/targeted content will certainly find a market.

The tools of Infowar available for personal use. Newsfeed manipulation, psy ops, personalized propaganda, targeting your boss for a raise, targeting a competitor into a mistake, a teen targeting his parents so they be more lenient, parents targeting their kids to nudge them in a wanted direction, etc.

This is a ridiculous example but the weaponization risks for adtech are interesting to contemplate. Do ad networks take any steps to verify who is placing ads?

I immediately though that this might be somehow more successful (and somewhat less creepy) if this was used to prank other people. "Send this link to your friend and they'll get ads for dragon dildos everywhere". IIRC there are online services to glitter bomb people, it would fit in that niche I suppose.

I'm utterly doubtful that sending your wife ads like "3 reasons to initiate sex with your husband" would have any effect at all (besides making it more likely to install ad ad blocker) but it is definitely one of the creepiest things I've read in a while. They're really preying on desperate people with that thing. Utterly immoral.

The only positive thing that can come out from this is making people even more aware of the risks of online tracking and how far it can go. After all if your creepy husband can use it to send you targeted ads in an attempt to change your habits, what can Google and friends do?

They can basically do the same thing -- if you ever have looked at a product on a Web site and then saw ads for that exact product for weeks you'd be familiar with it.

The really dumb one is when you've bought a product and then get ads (or recommendations) for the same thing for weeks. Thanks, Amazon, I really don't need another framing hammer, I've got one already.

I was more focusing on the way ads can already be highly targeted on the retailer's behalf; it seems to me that there is nothing technically implausible about what the wife seduction service advertises.

I feel like there must be a lot of holes considering ads' popularity as a vector for viruses.

Hahaha, this "journalist".

  What my investigation found

  Perhaps my cynical, journalistic spidey sense is awry 

  As someone who is half-Israeli, lives in Tel Aviv, and speaks Hebrew, I take personal offense to this sketchy operation

Someone should tell him about satire.

Brainwashing your wife to vote for a republican president? Old News!

> “We should all be thanking the Valley Bros that made The Spinner – it might just be what it takes for folks to sit up and take note of (a) how this crap works (b) what it is designed to do (c) how fucked up it all is,” Aral Balkan, a self-described cyborg rights activist, added. “The Spinner is surveillance capitalism in its purest… The Spinner is surveillance capitalism’s Martin Shkreli moment.”

Well, that's an interesting choice of example, because Shkreli went to jail and nothing much else has changed (in fact the Trump administration is talking about forcing prices up outside the US too).

queue downvotes but isn't dating the same thing? brainwashing each other.

You'll have to explain to me how surreptitiously manipulating somebody's internet in order to influence them to have sex with you can be likened to dating.

The expression is "cue," but also no.

Only if both people are psychopaths, which is statistically low in occurrence. Normally though, no.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/brainwashing

I'm going to go with: No.

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