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Comment by donclark | Hacker News Reader

If they are not actually listening, has someone mapped out how I get an ad related to a verbal conversation? What did they do to put the pieces together? I would imagine several different scenarios to get an actual match - but Ive wondered this at least a couple of times (too close a coincidence that is).

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They don’t need to listen to audio, which is very cumbersome and error prone, if they have your location. If your location is available, so are all of your friends’ locations. The apps can easily see who’s in the same place at the same time and generate a “friend” network. Presumably you talk to your friends about your thoughts, and they talk to their friends. All it takes is a few people to start googling something new (or looking up products in Amazon, or searching for the same tags on Instagram, etc etc) in this network for the algorithm to realize this might be something you’re ALL talking to each about, and thus advertise straight to you, giving the perfect illusion that whatever you’re talking about is advertised back to you.

It's a mixture of things. The first is "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon" / frequency bias. Your friends talk about X, all of a sudden you notice adverts about X.

Of course, you discount the thousands of adverts you see which aren't about X.

Why are you and your friends talking about X? Because it's a demographically popular topic. And advertisers have noticed that $gender people of $age_range in $city are searching for X. So you get an advert. You're not as unique as you think!

Or, while hanging out, you're attached to the same WiFi spot. One of you does a search for X before talking about it. So the retargetting continues.

The key thing is - why are you talking about what you're talking about?

Can all apps access information on the wifi hotspot that a user is connnected to? Seems like an information leak that should be closed by Apple/Google.

The server the app is communicating with can see the IP address of the user, which may be enough to uniquely identify multiple users connected on the same network.

But yes, both iOS[1] and Android[2] have APIs for accessing the name of the connected wifi network. Access depends a bit on how old your OS is and what permissions your app has.

And even if you've locked down permissions for the facebook app, you might have a different app which includes an SDK that slurps up the wifi name, GPS, signal strength of nearby wifi networks, connected cell tower info, and nearby bluetooth devices. That info gets sold to a data broker, which facebook may buy to hit you with an ad for whatever your mate just googled on the other end of the couch.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/679038

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21391395/get-ssid-when-w...

Bob searches for "new Ford car" on Google, Dave is sat next to him in the pub, he opens up his Facebook, and sees an ad for a new Ford car.

The hotspot isn't sharing anything, but the apps are putting data together. Google says "This IP is looking this up, and the tracking matches one of your users" (Or maybe they just firehose searches for relevant terms? I dunno.) Facebook app sees that, then sees that Dave is also using that IP for his Facebook app, put together with a list of Bob/Dave's friends and IP's, it's a high probability that they are talking about it currently, so show Bob's friends nearby that ad.

Wondering the same thing..I'm having targeted ads based on my verbal conversations, way too many for coincidence.

It's no longer as sensible as it used to be to browse the internet any more.

No need, the internet is browsing you.

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