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Ask HN: Older friends being targeted by Google ads for funerals and cemeteries?

13 points by andrewstuart ↗ HN
Older friends of mine say they are constantly being targeted by Google ads for funerals and cemeteries.

Needless to say, they don't like it.

They say they've tried to make it stop (I do not know how), but the ads keep coming back.

Is there anything they can do to stop it totally?

17 comments

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popeathlete
uBlock.
dependenttypes
Make sure to install uBlock Origin instead, it is developed by the original uBlock developer. uBlock was hijacked by another person for their own profit (and has seen much less development compared to uBlock Origin while also containing anti-user features).
phobosanomaly
Why would older folks be targeted? Wouldn't it be their kids who would be the ones you would want getting the ads?

Either way it's pretty dark stuff.

smt88
"Older" could mean a wide range of ages.

Regardless, older people have parents, siblings, and spouses to plan funerals for, even if they're not pre-planning for their own (which is not uncommon).

rootsudo
They include insurance you buy, pre-need. That's why old folks are targeted. If you review death care public corps like SCI - it makes up 25-40% of annual revenue and can expire, non-refundable, etc.

https://investors.sci-corp.com/

"Investor day presentation."

phobosanomaly
Really a fascinating link.

They have an artificial reef 3 miles off the coast of Miami that is "an artistic representation of the Lost City of Atlantis."

What a strange, niche industry.

082349872349872
If they didn't wish to go ad-free, they could browse different things to move their ad bubble around.

I would be happiest when the ads I get are way off target and the people LinkedIn suggests are complete strangers.

The latter I've never really managed, but the former is not that difficult: at one point my ad stream consisted largely of luxury condos in St. Petersburg and bank accounts in Cyprus.

I took an online hearing test long ago and now ads are convinced I'm a fair bit older than I actually am. I'm not sure what would be most effective to get the trackers to assign a younger cohort, but in imagining generational browsing tells, I suppose cartoon nostalgia is probably one of the best proxies for birth year/location.

(In the pre-internet days, discount magazine subscriptions were one of the inputs to marketers' lists. Bernays describes the use of segmentation in WWI propaganda.)

See also https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t... . Böll worked in a statistical office, so he's well aware of how little the narrator is Sticking It To The Man, but despite that depicts an example worthy of emulation.

lowdose
> I'm not sure what would be most effective to get the trackers to assign a younger cohort.

Start searching for contraceptives and within no time you are not only 15 but also female.

mkj
Don't sign in to Google, use Firefox?
rshnotsecure
80% of the funeral homes in the US are controlled by Providence Equity. It is likely them. [1]

I don't have the link, but the funeral home that had 100+ bodies piling up in NYC a few weeks ago was theirs.

[1] - https://provequity.com

platinum1
Your friends can control their profiles, including seeing how their ads are personalized, changing certain aspects of that personalization, or turning off ad personalization totally, at http://adssettings.google.com
perl4ever
When I write something like "ad-tech is horrible shit" I get ads about a mysterious alternative to toilet paper with a picture of the legs of a person on a toilet.

When I GISed a historical church in the town where I grew up, I started getting ambulance chaser ads "do you know these priests".

I don't think there's any way to make it stop. I've turned off a lot of things on FB and Google, and gotten uBlock Origin but it's like patching a sieve hole by hole, when you can't even tell if a whole new breach has opened up.

stakkur
I don't think so, short of setting up robust ad blocking. Start with Firefox + Privacy Badger + uBlock Origin, for example.
giantg2
I have a Pi-hole. That seems to block most ads.

"Needless to say, they don't like it." Why's that? It wouldn't bother me any more than any other ad.