HN Explorer

Ask HN: Talked about my fave cereals now I see ads for the exact cereals. How?

37 points by mrsmee89 ↗ HN
I was talking to my family meme bees about my top five cereals. (Reese’s puffs, Cap’n Crunch etc) I open up Twitter about an hour later and I see ads for those two exact cereals. I never searched for anything but even if I did and don’t remember my search engine is ddg.

There was a tlc Roku tv (which I’m connected to for remote control) and my iPhone, that’s it.

How the hell did I get these ads? I’ve never got a cereal ad before.

51 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] thread
throwaway413
Did any of your family members search around online while you were talking to them?

What led you to the discussion of cereals in the first place?

mrsmee89
Nobody else had a phone with them. There where only the two devices I mentioned above. Both connected to the same WiFi network.

That’s a good question. Boredom led to the convo, I wasn’t using my phone at the time but even if I was “googling”, I would’ve been using duck duck go.

decasteve
Did you buy those cereals recently? What method of payment did you use?
mrsmee89
I didn’t, a family member did buy one of the two via credit card. Could that be it? The. We got associated via the WiFi network?
Nextgrid
Very possible. Facebook and other social networks (and their SDKs embedded in every mainstream app) use IP addresses as a way to infer relationships between people.
davismwfl
Data aggregators can/do get the purchase history of people and will associate that with their marketing id, I built systems to do this and it is amazing how detailed it is. This includes in store purchases, digital purchases, and can even include cash purchases if you have a store discount card etc.

Generally IME we would get other devices associated to that user. e.g. If Sam bought something on his cell phone, when we aggregated that data or purchased it from others, we could associate Sam's other devices (computer, tablet etc). Typically we would only target this consumer based upon their marketing id across devices, and not target associated devices which didn't match to the user. However, there are some aggregators that do track devices commonly seen with the user, regardless of a known marketing id.

So not impossible you could have been targeted this way.

kratom_sandwich
Most likely explanations:

> Confirmation bias

> Coincidence

> You left other traces on the internet (searches, whatever) which fit into a pattern of people liking specific cereals

jfoster
Also, if you are part of the target market for a product, it makes sense that you might be demographically targeted as well as mention the product in conversation.
davismwfl
I have no proof of how this works, but I worked building digital marketing and ad targeting for a decent portion of my career and have some theories. First, you would be amazed by the amount of data that is flying around about you from different sources, and how specific we could get. And as you know Siri and Alexa are always listening to every word so they can respond to the wake word. I believe recently Amazon admitted to storing all these records IIRC (please correct me if I am mis-remembering it).

Given that I feel that Apple, Amazon and Google all have deals with a number of key marketing companies where they sell your marketing id based on keywords their devices "hear". So they aren't sharing your conversation with third parties but selling your marketing id based upon what they hear, e.g. you start talking about diapers and they'll sell your marketing id tagging diapers. I have done tests with this in creative ways with a few people and we've been able to trigger ads within a very short time period for things that in no way should be showing up and that none of us ever searched for or typed into the computer/device.

I'm all for someone proving me wrong or giving a better explanation but knowing how we dealt with peoples electronic data and what we had available to us I can't imagine they aren't doing this given what we have seen.

mrsmee89
Thanks for the detailed answer. That’s fascinating.

To be clear , you’re suggesting that there’s a map of labels (diapers, cereal etc) to marketing ids so apple can still say they anonymize your data even though for all intent and purposes, they don’t?

davismwfl
Correct, this is how some data aggregators sell your purchase data without actually selling your receipts. You will have a number of marketing id's from different aggregators, but people like Amazon, eBay etc will aggregate from multiple sources and can track you across aggregators. And there are re-targeting and re-marketing companies that do this as a service.

It lets them say they never sell your data, but they do sell meta-data about you. Probably a little over simplified but you get the idea.

mrsmee89
Wow! If you tell someone that you purchased #123 and they know that #123 is shampoo, how is that not the same exact thing as telling them that you bought shampoo? I’m shocked at the sliminess of this.
eb0la
You can guess this product affinity with a list of previous purchases. Just take a look at the 'arules' R package (https://github.com/mhahsler/arules).

You don't need to identify the customer.

I did some work with an online supermarket some time ago and I found some interesting associations worth trying like Sliced Brioche Bread + Nutella :-)

Sadly I didn't find any association like 'beer and diapers' ;-)

winrid
I thought the listening for the wake word was done in hardware for Alexa?
viraptor
> And as you know Siri and Alexa are always listening to every word so they can respond to the wake word. I believe recently Amazon admitted to storing all these records IIRC (please correct me if I am mis-remembering it).

This is not entirely correct the way I understand it. While they're listening as in, the mic is active, the full text processing is not happening until the trigger word. There's a reason Siri is called Siri (distinctive pattern, easy to pick up before applying a stricter check). The issue with the recording was that the device thought it heard the trigger word and the mismatched sample was still uploaded.

What I don't believe is happening is actual background conversation processing by the assistants on purpose. (There are going to be tech slipups) Simply because the moment that's revealed, they'll get a regulatory ban hammer they really do not want. It would also chew through either your data or battery and be easy to notice.

I don't put that much faith in TVs though for example...

ryanwaggoner
Given that I feel that Apple, Amazon and Google all have deals with a number of key marketing companies where they sell your marketing id based on keywords their devices "hear".

Your feelings notwithstanding, there is zero evidence of this that I've seen.

mytailorisrich
Either the ad was directed to you via data and criteria totally unrelated to your discussion with your family or the firmware of your brainstem implant has recently been updated.

The former is probably slightly more likely.

whyhow
Last year around Christmas time I was talking to my wife about what candy I wanted in my stocking. I said something like, "I really like those gold ball candies. I can't remember their name. Maybe ranchero something?"

Then less than an hour later I had an ad on my phone for ferrero rocher candy. It was incredibly creepy.

I know supposedly the Google phone and Google home (in my case a model from Lenovo) doesn't parse your conversation for ads, but I have no other explanation.

mrsmee89
That’s incredibly creepy! I get the need for advertising but the sliminess has gone too far. I know it’s silly but I feel like there’s space right now for an ad company with morals that they can prove :)

Also see @davismwfl answer on this thread.

vb6sp6
Is it possible your wife googled it? That may have flagged your household to receive those ads
J-dawg
Almost all of these "OMG Google/Facebook is listening to me" happenings can be explained by this mechanism
DHPersonal
Those candies are regularly advertised around the holiday.
aga98mtl
Someone using the same ip (Your wifi router?) googled those terms or went to a product page.
artemisyna
Another possibility: Perhaps one of y'all ended up bringing up the topic of cereals (and those cereals in specific) because of a new ad campaign one of y'all saw.

You hadn't seen it yet, but lo and behold, you did later.

thiht
I'm not native so sorry for the weird question, but is "y'all" a common idiom? It sounds weird, is it something I could use or does it imply something particular?
t-writescode
English does not have a distinct, second-person plural. There are several regional attempts to make one.

Y’all is the Southern second-person plural, a contraction of ‘you all’ (you, second-person; all, suggesting more than one)

omosubi
this is becoming common in the rest of the US as well because of the lack of second person plural. they call it y'all sprawl. I hear it frequently here in Chicago.
itronitron
y'all is a common idiom in the southeastern US as well as Texas. It is a contraction of 'you all' and can mean an individual or one or more members of a group.

all y'all by comparison is generally agreed to mean everyone in the group and can be a replacement for the phrase every last one of you

sergiotapia
My wife and I were talking about where to have our kids birthday party. A few days later my wife got a bunch of ads for Chuck e cheeses birthday coupons. she and i both didn't search for anything about kid birthday parties.
fl0wenol
In this particular case, I think what really happened is that ad network(s) have guessed when your kid(s) birthdays are, probably due to searches at or around the same time last year, browsing the toys section on amazon, then visiting Party City, that kind of stuff.

No less creepy, but can understand why you'd think that.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
eb0la
You are targeted for this because you are in the network of the one who purchased/searched for it.

Works like a charm with Facebook and items with a high price tab (like high end phones) because the one who search for the phone advices with the end buyer.

I've never seen it for low price tag items. Probably there is an algorithm out there calculating the odds of becoming you a customer. Probably you are on the age target for that brand.

laszlo-kiss
My wife and I experience this on a regular basis. We even tested it. Picked a subject that is never a conversation piece, we spoke about it with our phones and Amazon's Alexa near by and guess what: an ad that we have never seen showed up within hours that was directly related to this subject... We are convinced that our conversation is minimally listened to if not recorded (for AI training purposes of course).
dragonwriter
The conversation primes you to notice the ad, which otherwise you would ignore and take no special note of. Do the same thing but in writing, near devices that have no video input, and you are likely to get the same result.

Do it many times with both spoken and written topics, and away from and near the devices, and I bet you'll seem similar frequency of hits afterward.

adkadskhj
Or just plan a topic and a survey period. Eg if we're going to talk about cereal, monitor Facebook/etc for cereal ads for X hours, then under similar conditions (time of day/etc) after you talk about cereal for a while.

To be ultra paranoid i'd avoid even chatting about it digitally. ISP distrust.

pmiller2
One should also try talking about a topic with no phones or other connected devices with microphones around. If ads start appearing after that, you've pretty much confirmed it's just recency bias causing you to notice the ads.
the_only_law
I've a few similar things happen. I talked to my brother on a discord vpice chat. He very briefly mentioned some game he plays and we went back to what we were doing. I never did anything else regarding that game, not searches, not text convos mentioning it, nothing. The next day I started seeing YouTube ads for it.
[dead] nopeNopeNooope
Obviously the most likely explanation is that every corporation within earshot has started an illegal clandestine wiretapping of you and your wife using machine learning at great expense in hardware and power.

Some people might say you started talking about cereal because you were blasted with commercials about cereal you just didn't remember until that conversation framed you to remember them.

But we know better.

dt123
I know you have an iPhone but I used to have a similar experience on Android, by default it records your voice to 'train its voice recognition', which I think is where it came from. I disabled it in the settings and it never happened again.
DHPersonal
When we bought our first family vehicle we were a little nervous about it being the right choice. After driving it for a while we began to notice how many other people drove the same model. Did other people start driving that type of car because of us? No, we just started paying attention to the frequency of our sighting that model, which led us to the conclusion that it was more popular than we realized.

The same can be true with advertisements.

In the last week this has happened to me twice: once, in a YouTube video being posted by someone that directly related to a conversation I had yet to have and a free flashlight offer appearing in an advertisement on the day I lost power from ice storms. Both were more likely coincidences than anything else.

lumberjack
The other involved parties Googled the stuff, maybe.
gitgud
Personally, I was very sceptical of phones listening. But this paper on [1] "Ultrasonic Device Tracking", has convinced me that the technology is definitely possible.

Apparently it's known as ultrasonic malware and is a type of side-channel attack to leak information to/from devices. So high-frequency audio is transmitted to devices that are listening and can even respond.

The scary thing is that researchers have already found this type of software embedded into [2] many applications.

Now this isn't the same as listening to "human conversations", but it's not hard to believe that some apps are waiting for any audio and just sending it to servers somewhere...

What apps do you have installed on your phone? Any games? Apparently [3] some games listen to you, even in the background...

[1] https://intellisec.de/pubs/2016-batmobile.pdf

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/234-android-a...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a...

BugWatch
I wonder if anyone has made an implementation of this as a low-cost indoor positioning system for a smart home. Maybe with some simple beacons transmitting at a certain frequency, and the phone receiving, processing that and updating its estimated location to a home server. It probably wouldn't be precise enough for a definite location (and room-precision is usually enough), but coupled with other approaches...

__________ = The frequency range would probably have to be pet-safe, since dogs and cats can hear way higher frequencies that we can't.

spacemanmatt
True story: Whenever I refer to the article, "PHP is a fractal of bad design" on a call, I get a bunch of wordpress articles in my newsfeed within the hour.
earthwrldshaman
This seems like an anecdotal experience that is brought up alot in the last couple years. Ive certainly had some experiences similar to many reported on this thread. However, one more recently was different in an interesting way:

I was talking to a friend of mines who recently had gotten into trading on robinhood and he was just explaining his investing strategy, as it were, to me as we walked through a park we frequent. I had my iphone on me as usual. Anways later that evening I would get one of these spam follow requests on instagram from some investing related personality account; keep in my mind I have essentially never searched for investing/market related info or content ever on my machine and definitely not on instagram, most of whom I follow are celebrities or artists.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
bruceb
If it makes you feel any better I have started seeing cereal ads in my twitter feed since about last week and I don't search or talk about cereal. There is some push for remembering your childhood with cereal going on right now. Mark it down to coincidence.