TV is watching you – Companies inventing new ways to make money off your data
vox.com
vox.com
People are not matched with "relevant ads" due to their interests, it is due to the advertisers interest in your demographics.
(also, the writer might be hedging his bets with ads/advertisers on his page)
I dislike this game where we mince words like it changes the fundamental argument. The two crowds want to be linked up in a way that transfers money most happily from consumers to producers. Unhappy purchases are likely to result in returns. Of course, if one advertiser can keep your returns below a certain rate (or won’t cause them to explode), that’s more ideal, so naturally the market will select for companies that do this unless they have some other incredible metrics outweighing that.
Really the only time this isn’t true is with companies designed around maximal waste - products are often too cheap to bother returning and are only meant to last a use or two anyways.
The goal of any advertising service is fully automated population-scale digital pimping, with an extremely sophisticated matchmaking service (backed by all that data) as a value-add.
They put your ass on the RTB street to turn tricks. You get mindfucked by--and maybe catch some viruses from--any John who wants to take a crack at you. In return, you get this nice cheap TV/Youtube/Gmail/article.
Bitch better have my money!
An increase in relevance isn't exactly the same thing as an increase in favor, but it's hard to believe they're not correlated.
Not emotion focused ads, which is what The Man wants me to see to make me buy his stuff.
I don't watch ads but if I did I would prefer a "what, how, price" setup.
- Ads I'd like: More cute cases for either P9Pro or a Galaxy S25 I'm watching the ads on.
- Ads the company is pushing: iPhone-only cases which I can't use anywhere.
Quite staggering the incompetence of targeting those :)
I'm sort of surprised that the industry isn't 70% print-on-demand these days-- just say "we have a nice sturdy case design for the top 500 phone models, and upload your own art".
Samsung can't make money off me buying vintage tools or computer parts. I'd love to see those ads.
But Samsung can hit me with new washing machine ads, or ads for big businesses pushed thru their galaxy store.
Have you ever wondered why Roku TVs are so cheap? Check the default privacy settings. They fingerprint every single thing that displays on the TV and phone home. Here's an engineer right here on HN talking about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21012268
Also, there are ultrasonic beacons and other such signals at any reasonably busy public place and in many places you wouldn't expect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking
Even dishwashers: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-wont-connect-my-dis...
Is there an opening to have appliances that lack connectivity as a selling feature?
It's gross.
How often you use it and which cycles you use it for let me infer a few other things about other people in the house.
I can either use those to bolster confidence in a narrower profile or I can just add those data points to the raw profile and charge marketers more for either the higher confidence profile or the profile with more data points.
The cell phone apps harvest data. Not so much on the actual appliance. There are also issues with the apps having malware bundled in them. They're just bad apps, generally.
The appliances do get hacked though. It's not unusual for IoT devices to be used in ddos attacks.
Really, this is just a good reason that everyone should be using, at least, router level DNS filtering to disable a lot of this stuff. One can go a lot further but that's a good start.