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I have a running joke with a friend about "what Jeff wants to sell me today".
(Jeff being Jeff Bezos, i.e. Amazon recommendations.)
Strange things Jeff has wanted to sell me recently:
After playing a bit of Baldur's Gate 3, I now imagine Jeff Bezos as a deep gnome merchant with an astonishingly random assortment of products ....
I'm imagining you going into wal mart, arriving at checkout with all those items in a row. Queue very skeptical look from the cashier.
Queue is a line of something. Cue is a hint or signal.
Uhh, nah I totally meant that they're queueing up their skeptical looks. Yeah, totally on purpose.
Around 2010 I was going through a traditional Irish music phase. I remember listening to Pandora while eating my lunch and after the song "Finnegans Wake" I got an advertisement for "Funerals starting at $900 in the {where I lived} area".
I understand why it was suggested, most people listening to The Dubliners are probably 30-40 years older than me. It also made me laugh to imagine some sales guy going to a funeral home and pitching advertising as a way to drum up more business.
It's brilliant audience choice, though. Fully 100% of Spotify listeners are going to die.
So it isn't a strange item, but the length of time I got targeted ads was absurd.
In 2018 I had to buy a new mattress. I Googled directions to the nearest mattress store and got a mattress. For the next 3 years every single video ad I got anywhere was for mattresses. Do y'all know how many people decided to just start making mattresses... I didn't think the ads would end...
You don't buy a mattress every week?
Wait, how many of you aren't getting a weekly mattress? Our family gets a new mattress every fortnight TOPS.
3 years seems like an insane amount of time between mattresses.
Oh my algorithm is FUCKED because I'm so insanely curious.
So first of all I'm always googling stuff from medical procedures to culture and liguistics. That's part of how I found out that apparently black Americans will sometimes get a nose job to confirm better to western beauty standards.
Second of all, I will click on everything that I can't identify, which often turn out to be kitchen implements or specialized hobby equipment. One time I clicked on some weird looking shoes, shortly followed by some bizarre looking amorphous plastic things which turned out to be special climbing shoes and screw-in footholds, respectively.
So anyway, that's the story of how Google adsense thinks I'm an African American woman who hates her nose but is also extremely passionate about indoor climbing (none of this is even remotely true).
I like the way you use the internet.
Aren't you worried about ransomwares though?
YouTube gave me an ad for an organisation to deradicalize islamic terrorists.
The night before a terror bombing very close to my house, organised and readied in a house a few blocks from me that I walk past to get the bus.
I never see any online ads.
For duvets, the day after I bought a duvet, from the retailer that sold me the duvet. You have all the data in the world, steal all my data to target me personally, and that is the best you can come up with?
For [acronym] the day after I was emailing someone about a completely different thing that used the same acronym. That one was more creepy than strange, tbf.
I was bra shopping and clicked on one that was also a breast pump. Started getting ads for baby stuff for a couple months. I also listen to Spotify at work, there are currently a bunch of Hispanic construction workers working on the building. Since then about a third of my Spotify ads are in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish.
Xbox gives me Spanish HBO max ads. No other ads are in Spanish and the only thing slightly Spanish on my Xbox is part of one of my friends real name.
I should check my ad vault to see what ads Adnausem is blocking for me.
I block all possible ads so I haven't been getting any random ones in ages, but my email provider has an ad for "Moorhuhn" on their page that always slips through the filter somehow so whenever I check my emails I'm asked to shoot virtual chickens.
I keep seeing adverts for hearing aids, retirement homes and 'miracle' cosmetic treatments. WTF Google, I'm not out of my 40s yet!
I do a lot of building maintenance, so occasionally need to buy tools.
I'll do my research and end up buying stuff like Knipex, Wera, CK etc. I use them a lot so I'll pay for stuff that will last 100 years
Google - OH MY GOD YOU LIKE HAMMERS LOOK AT THIS HAMMER WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY A HAMMER WE HAVE HAMMER
Bitch I'm getting buried with this fucker
Helped my parents get treatment for $old_people_health_complications. I used my phone for contact. I had barely started using that number in particular.
Next week I received a call asking if I wanted to "reserve a place in the town cemetery in case of the unfortunate" (it wasn't in the US, words might be different).
It wasn't me, it was my parents, and the fuckers tried to manipulate potentially grieving people.
I haven't seen an ad online in years.
Last one I remember was in like 2012. I was searching around for a wireless HDMI system and actually found and purchased it. For WEEKS post purchase this thing kept showing up in my adds. Everyone has case after case of these fuckers reading their mind and my only story is one that was so fucked it was funny. They were always overselling their capabilities I think.
youtube hit me with an ad for a company that makes those little outlet boxes that go in walls. so of course my ass watched the full video, liked it, left a comment, shared the url, the whole nine yards.
American football fans probably remember the crazy wildcard playoff game between the Colts and Chiefs during the 2013 season's playoffs. The Chiefs built up a big lead, but Andrew Luck led the Colts to an insane comeback victory.
I am a Chiefs fan. At the time, the Chiefs had not won a playoff game since 1993. After a devastating 2012 season, the team cleaned house and brought in a new regime, led by Andy Reid. It worked well and the Chiefs had one of the biggest record improvements year-to-year in NFL history. My optimism was at an all time high. This was the year the playoff curse would end.
I spent the week leading up to the game just absorbed in the hype, reading, listening, and watching every bit of analysis I could find.
When the game finally ended, I was absolutely devastated. It's probably the hardest I've ever taken a loss as a fan.
...and then, I started getting targeted ads for Colts merch, including a cardboard Andrew Luck mask (which was just a cutout of his face with the eyes cut out stuck to a popsicle stick.) Everywhere I went on the internet, I was haunted by a grinning, eyeless, Andrew Luck reminding me that the Chiefs would never win a playoff game. This went on for several weeks.
Every time I talk about food, I get ads for certain restaurants. That is the typical experience of mine. I mentioned "those fancy onion looking houses in Russia" and the next thing I know an ad for blooming onions from Outback Steakhouse appears before a YouTube video. I dare not even speak other languages near some technology because then the language of my ads change. Not only that, but my phone must know when I wake up in the morning because I get phone calls as soon as I wake up, and I've had certain websites misgender me because a guy is talking near my technology or is in a photo or because I sound tomboyish or look tomboyish in photos and they were trying to "detect" my gender using the spy stuff. I'm surprised these people who are behind the surveillance still trust their own judgment.
