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Comment by ahallock | Hacker News Reader

> If somebody looks over my shoulder and sees the ads presented to me, they can infer things about me.

You have to take some personal responsibility, though. If they saw your Youtube recommendations or your Spotify playlist, they'd probably make inferences as well. That porn link in your history you forgot to clear? Be aware of who's watching and browse anonymously if you're concerned.

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I've had ads for sketchy shit I googled at home on my personal computer show up on my work computer at the office.

I've had ads for things that I only just spoke about, out loud, to someone near me like a friend or family member, show up on a computer in a different country.

I've had ads for things spoken about show up in FB. I have more of a libertarian mindset, but that really creeps me out and I think speech-based ads be outright banned due to privacy concerns. It's not so much the ads; it's being recorded and potentially having those recordings leak in a data breach.

Or it's just one of 100 coincidences that happen to you every day.

Easy to prove, store a log of all your network traffic, and record all the audio you speak, then when you see a match, go back, find the proof, become world famous

I stand corrected. I thought I had read this was actually happening, but it appears to only be speculation.

It was widely believed for literally years until the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in 2018 where Zuck called it a 'conspiracy theory'. Since then it has been dismissed as such. My question is - if I personally observed it before I even heard about this 'theory', and thousands of others around the world also observed the same thing, why are we dismissing it as a 'conspiracy theory'? Just because Zuck labelled it as such? Why are we trusting him to tell us the truth again?

Connecting personal accounts (Gmail, Chrome browser profiles) on a work computer is something that you should only do with careful thought.

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