An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads | Hacker News Reader

An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads

theregister.com

"I listen to the books on my iPhone and often search for and check out books there too,"

So, contrary to what one might infer, this was not paper books at a physical library.

Still vile though.

I’d like to know what subgenre is so specific that the attorney was sure the ad was targeted, yet is general enough to warrant its own ad, and is sensitive enough that she didn’t want it named in this article.

Monster romance.

Is that what the kids grew up to call it?

To paraphrase another tale; you can clerk for the supreme court for decades, but if you read just one book about sexy fun times with that cute goat from the hot yoga class . . .

of course you want to know -- yet the attorney is protecting that part of the story (I agree with that stance). it is not anyone's business what she reads. Mechanisms for recording and building a dossier on each device user is exactly to make it a business.. so there are conflicting drives.

If you use a device to access digital content, must your search and preference be made into the fodder of someone else's business ? Access to written material of your choice, without prejudice, is fundamental in the West. These battles were bitterly fought in previous generations.

It’s certainly her right to withhold that information, but it leaves a hole in the published story that makes it much harder to assess whether her description of what happened is likely true.

Right now, I’d say it’s about a 6 on a plausibility scale of 0-10. With the relevant details, she could maybe boost that to an 8… or drop it to a 4.

Vetting things like this is literally the job of journalists so a story can be told while allowing the subjects a level of protection. It’s the difference between a published story and someone just making things up. As a reader, you make the credibility assessment based on trust in the author and the publication.

I wonder if she also did a Google search for the same genre and if this is why she was retargeted.

She did. This seems like a complaint about getting personalized ads.

> Dudley said she typically listens to 30 to 40 audiobooks a month, most of which are fiction. "I listen to the books on my iPhone and often search for and check out books there too," she said.

To be fair, I do hate personalized ads.

I’m a little skeptical of this story - but that quote is not evidence that she used a search engine. She could mean searching and checking out books in the library apps or on the library web site.

It is possible. Apple does have an ad network so it is quite possible that this is just Apple logging searches in their apps and showing ads in other apps.

Or did some searches on other device but just don't remember doing so. Then again some tracking info somewhere linking up could also be reasonable.

There is reasons for GDRP...

That's almost certainly what happened. It's the same thing that happens in all of these stories.

I've always felt that advertising is fundamentally a bad thing for the Internet. I feel this strongly when I experience episodes of privacy-invading ad targeting. I set my privacy preferences in Google settings to not show me ads based on my interests and I'm quite diligent about opting out of sending cookie data to third parties. It's like I'm protesting in my own small way to try to minimize any benefit the ad ecosystem gets from me. However, sometimes I do get ads for products or services that are so appropriate and tempting that I temporarily put aside my high-minded ideals ;-)

> The only correlating factor between the two devices is the IP address

While certainly possible, it is unlikely. It takes a lot of rigor not to provide a correlation between two identities. All it takes is logging in to a service from both devices (not necessarily simultaneously) or probably even some less obvious events.

I assumed IP address tracking was easy? I seem to often get ads relevant to people who share my home WiFi network.

better to torrent down the pdf/mp3

This would be a lot more interesting of an article if we could tell what this mysterious genre is.... I'm guessing they don't like their taste being called out as predictable.

The sites she visited are likely using Google Analytics. Not much of a conspiracy imo.

Data from GA itself isn’t used/sold for audience targeting

Ehm... HN readers are typically tech savvy people so... Let's say you have a connected computer, formally not in your hand, but practically still yours, since you deploy it, you provision it etc during it's entire life. The user have almost no control on it. It's a closed system.

Well... How many will try, even just for fun, to do something they like on that said computer?

Now imaging it's not one but a gazillion and you are a company known to someone in your country intelligence offering you a significant amount of money for some "OSINT-alike help", than there is even a law that mandate "helping" under certain not exactly strict circumstances...

The Attorney should be surprised if some snooping DO NOT happen, nor for the contrary.

A bottomline: this is why we MUST MANDATE FLOSS by law, and we MUST own our tools.

Just a small example: I bet anyone reading this comment know that banks can give their customer a {PDF/PADES,XML/XADES,JSON/JADES} signed receipt for any transaction (stocks ops, transfers etc), I'm also pretty sure NOBODY reading this have ever seen such perfectly feasible receipts EVER. All though those not to young probably remember on-paper receipts for most common operations back than. Why? Technically if all parts are fair it's simply a good practice, any party involved have a double signed proof of a transaction, every party have a copy of it, signed by both counterparts easily verifiable with their respective public keys registered in a large network of keyservers some owned and granted by the Government. Why not? It's a protection for all "no one can say to have ordered something different". Why this does not exists? Why while all the western automakers who suffer a significantly growing Chinese industry while we, once the best in the world now almost lag behind, do not decide to respond with an open design, imposing all using it remaining equally open, GPL-alike for hw, since we still rule in software and high tech stuff? Such an open design, offering FLOSS cars allowing to connect directly to them, having the car web-served by the car itself as a personal subdomain, no crapplications and crappy slow and unreliable services will be a significant incentive to buy our models. Why not teaching FLOSS desktops and model at school to form IT-literate Citizens instead of clueless users https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... of modern old mainframes now renamed cloud services with dumb terminals now renamed "endpoints"?

Answer this and you'll discover the rest.

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