• luciferofastora@feddit.org
        1·
        2 hours ago

        That article is a riot. Also disturbing and depressing. And confusing, but not because of the author, but because of Amazon.

        I get that balancing out the different factors that play into the likelihood of buying it again is difficult, but with all the data they gather, it really shouldn’t be impossible to figure out that the mode of “purchases per customer” for a given product cluster is 1 or that a frequent recommendation has not actually gotten any interest and use those for weighing the random recommendation selection.

        Even within some product group you buy more frequently, there might be certain brands / vendors you prefer, so buying something once to try (particularly if it’s new) and never again should also reduce the likelihood.

        But I’m just a Junior Data Analyst, what do I know.

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
    112·
    2 days ago

    And yet I can explicitly type the exact parameters for an item I’m looking for into Google or Amazon and I get flooded with bullshit that is not that thing.

    • FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
      67·
      2 days ago

      “Oh you’re looking for a red KitchenAid blender type # 5KSB2073EER? Great! Here’s that 4 CD set of traditional Turkmenistan folk music you wanted.”

    • Mirror Giraffe@piefed.socialEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      Not until I finally buy something do I get floder with the right ads, at which point those ads are pointless.

      For all the data they have on us they sure are pretty ass at utilizing it.

    • Sludgehammer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      1 day ago

      That’s because what you’re searching for is what you definitely want, so they know you’re likely click/buy it. But if throw a bunch of crap that you maybe might want before you get to it, maybe you’ll buy some of that too. It’s like how supermarkets throw a bunch of junk food in a checkout lane, maybe you’ll get tempted while you’re forced to stand there even though you just wanted to buy laundry detergent.

  • trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf
    172·
    1 day ago

    Remember when people used to think we were crazy regarding advertising based on speech secretly recorded?

    I do this fun thing I’ve dubbed the “platypus test” to show people how crazy it is. If you open Instagram and scroll through reels while talking gibberish adding the word platypus every now and then you will eventually start seeing them in your feed. Its rather quick too, I managed to get results within 10 minutes.

    • REDACTED@infosec.pub
      172·
      1 day ago

      I still think it’s bogus unless I see clear proof of it. That would imply your Instagram app somehow needs to bypass the kernel which let’s the system know when the microphone is being used (some OS let’s you know when mic or app is accessed real-time). That seems like an awfully open backdoor to microphone access.

      • trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf
        5·
        24 hours ago

        Go try it out and let me know your results. Just for context I’m using GrapheneOS. And yeah I know some hardware backdoor would seem paranoid but consider the reach of said company.

        • REDACTED@infosec.pub
          61·
          23 hours ago

          I have, repeatedly, because it’s not the first time I hear of this, only once did something similar to what I was saying appeared. Sounds like a coincidence to me.

      • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
        1·
        23 hours ago

        Happens a lot when you talk about burgers or pizza and you get an ad for whatever you’re talking about.
        You can say that’s coincidence, and yes these chains do a lot of ads.
        Then one day I’m looking at food to order (I have all the ad/tracking blockers) while my GF is on her laptop doing something completely different.
        I mention how bad restaurant X is. (there’s only one, not a chain)
        And in 2 minutes she gets the ad for that particular restaurant.
        Really, history has shown over and over that you can’t trust tech companies.

  • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    also, using Google to search for a term/subject while watching a YouTube video that mentioned it

    I searched the first four generic characters of something I’d never searched before, and the full subject popped right up as the suggestion

    either the phone is listening, or they’re cataloguing video content subjects. either way, building tons of data points on you

  • NottaLottaOcelot@lemmy.caEnglish
    30·
    2 days ago

    I tried getting directions to a restaurant from Google Maps yesterday and it routed me inefficiently through an intersection with a paid sponsor restaurant. This was the biggest enshittification of direction apps I’ve experienced. Not only did it give me worse directions, but what are the chances I need to stop at the paid restaurant when I am trying to get to another restaurant in 20 minutes?

    • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      20·
      1 day ago

      what are the chances I need to stop at the paid restaurant when I am trying to get to another restaurant in 20 minutes?

      That’s not the purpose though. This puts this other restaurant in your head for some other time. You may think you’re not actually affected by this tactic, but decades of research shows that, even when aware of this, it still fucking works.

  • abbadon420@sh.itjust.works
    57·
    2 days ago

    I’ve been looking for a new job. Now I get ads for jobs. That’s actually nice, were it not that they’re always the same five shitty jobs every time.

  • baatliwala@lemmy.world
    2·
    22 hours ago

    Been thinking, this is a common trope in anime (using glasses/other objects to try to hear through a barrier), does this actually work?

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    If they have all this marketing intel about me why do they deluge me with ads for major appliances right after I buy them? I mean how likely am I gonna want another dishwasher the same week?

    • CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world
      14·
      1 day ago

      I think them having all this info about you, is a way to get advertisers to pay them more for the targeted ads.

      It’s not to help you or the advertisers, but themselves.

      And I assume not a single advertiser has gone up to them with a well grounded: “bruh, dafuq are you doing showing fridge ads to the guy that just bought a fridge from us… that’s not what we are paying you for.”

      • Meron35@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 day ago

        From the manufacturer’s point of view all they see/hear from big tech is “these fridge ads are very effective, see this guy who bought a fridge as evidence.”

    • Rooster326@programming.dev
      2·
      22 hours ago

      Because they get paid to send ads to people who might be interested in Dishwashers.

      Google/Instagram/Whatever (generally) doesn’t make money when you buy a dishwasher.

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        20 hours ago

        I don’t see why not though - if they know which urls I visit, they should know about order confirmations. If companies are sharing all my browsing patterns why wouldn’t they share what I bought?

        • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          19 hours ago

          As far as I know, Google and Facebook do not collect every single URL you visit. It wouldn’t be impossible for Chrome to do this, but I think it would be public information because of the nature and volume of that information - even though efforts can be made to disguise what it collects. Facebook basically has no such ability because it collects information by having a little thing on each page, with the agreement of the page owner, and I don’t think that thing receives any info from a successful sale (as opposed to "person browsed this product’s page)

          • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            19 hours ago

            They don’t have to collect them as in saving them, they just have to collect information about activity that would interest marketers who buy the data. “Searched for dishwashers”… “Ordered dishwasher”…

            Then the marketers could process the data and go, Lovable Sidekick searched for dishwashers but didn’t buy one, maybe he’s still looking, let’s send him ads for dishwashers. Or, Lovable Sidekick bought a dishwasher, let’s not waste ad impressions showing him dishwasher ads, let’s show ads for dishwasher detergent. I mean, if I were part of that whole circus that’s how I would try to approach it.

            • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
              1·
              6 hours ago

              But to do that, Google would need to collect and save save and process every URL you go to. It would need to snoop not only that you looked at the dishwasher, but that you clicked “add to basket” and then “order” and then completed the order without ever removing it from the basket. That means analysing not just the pages you visit but also the underlying requests that control the basket and order process.

              There’s nothing it can do more minimally, and as far as I know it doesn’t do this.

  • k0e3@lemmy.ca
    16·
    2 days ago

    I wish Google would put so all their sitting soying spying to God good is use to improve their text prediction on their site swipe input.

    • abbadon420@sh.itjust.works
      7·
      1 day ago

      I’ve actually turned off my autocomplete lately. It’s become too annoying… I’d rather make “your fingers are too fat”-mistakes than all the “God” and “ducking” every time. People only have to understamd about 80% of the words you write in order to understand the message. Si, a swnwnve kike thud id not thw ens og the wprld.

    • MML@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      22 hours ago

      They already accomplished that, phones in like 16 had chips that were capable of doing it all on device without needing the cloud, which isn’t profitable.

    • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Yeah it’s worked like it was vibe-coded by AI since long before LLMs became mainstream (I wonder if that’s bc they are the predecessors of LLMs in the first place?).

      • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websiteEnglish
        2·
        19 hours ago

        Weirdly, back in the dumb phone days, with T9 I could bang out texts way faster and more accurately so long as I wasn’t straying too far out of the dictionary. But it was super easy to add new words, and it would pick them up later.