Tangentially related, for the first time ever I saw Gmail losing its anti-spam game. We were doing some home-modeling and we went to Home Depot sometime early this month. And... some entity somehow discovered this. And then all of a sudden I started getting spam emails related to Home Depot's/home rebuilding. The spam emails successfully pass through gmail's filter because they seem to emanate from aol,gmail,hotmail,yahoo etc. email addresses.
I'm about as impressed as I am mortified. I thought I had my opsec down, I was using noscript, I use throwaway email addy's where I suspect I'll be spammed.
But I was had too.
This Hecatoncheires entity is getting ever-larger. It knows a lot. It knows me well. I have seen evidence that it knows about the medication I take, the insecurities I have, my half-baked aspirations and plans. I feel defeated at times when I see its knowledge of me manifested in the ads I am shown, I feel confronted because at the time of this writing I don't know where this leak occurred, I don't know at what vector exactly I'm being had.
Google used to show personalized ads based on your emails but that process is supposedly stopped. Now Google reads your emails still to filter out spam and sort it into its default folders for promotions etc.
Also I guarantee I went directly to a website for a product, a vitamin, which I never searched for and purchased it and then received ads for the exact product and brand I purchased for the next week on Google searches and other Google ads and that was after they supposedly stopped personalizing ads. I don’t know if it was the credit card company, or Google analytics being installed on their website, or then just selling my data but it was obvious that someone was sharing my data and I wasn’t being told about it.
Lastly just last week I had been searching for a bed on Google, a very specific California king bed so that I could try to find the lowest price. Literally the day after I bought the bed, my girlfriend saw that exact model of bed appear on her Facebook ads. She had never searched for the bed or any bed but was browsing from the same IP address as me so I assume and that’s how they targeted her.
There are so many possibilities here. There is the stores you visited and the Credit card company involved along with anyone of the ad tech partners who have a cookie on you tied to your email.
Now how they know you bought X
1. Say CC sells data to say Bluekai (now salesforce). If you bought a hammer, they need not have known it was from HD, a middle man might simply be bidding for anyone categorized as shopping for home improvement goods and hoping to cash in on HD lead-gen/affiliate $$$
2. You likely searched online for these at some site and probably just don’t remember that you did.
The only thing that will get rid of this is to ban/regulate “affiliate” marketing (so shady companies who don’t follow rules can’t cash in), because so long as someone is willing to pay to bring sales, it will happen on way or another.
On my way I looked up directions in google maps, then for a week had dental insurance adds.
This one is obvious though.
That was on iOS with it’s pretty strict location tracking rules etc.
I’d be interested to see if you can get it to show you adds just by visiting the dentist (and not searching) on a vanilla android phone (IE google’s location history on by default)
Old school internet ad tech worked around what you are trying to do. We were doing this in 2003, before Google started up AdSense and well before acquiring DoubleClick.
The way it worked at [former employer] was, we had a lot of digital properties. Every digital property collected analytics on all visitors. All that analytics got post-processed and cross-referenced until we could form a "profile" on every visitor. Because you leave a teeny tiny trail of information everywhere you go, we cobble it all together until we know who you are on each site. The probability just gets higher as we collect more data. And we'd collect data from everywhere - e-mail marketing campaigns, ad traffic on partner sites, user profile data, web surfing habits, and buying access to privately maintained databases.
Even if everyone wore a mask and black clothes everywhere they went, surveillance cameras still capture height, gait, mannerisms. Watch long enough and you know "Gait #24434 mannerisms #593483 height #933 goes in/out of this residence at these specific times, goes to this supermarket, goes to this nail salon, sometimes goes to a house somebody else seems to live in".
Maybe it's multiple people with the same gait, mannerisms, height - but in the same neighborhood? In any case, it doesn't matter if they are all different people as long as they behave the same way; we market to them the same. Your entire life is just a string of digits in a marketing-recommender algorithm.
The one that kills me inside is all of the student loan scam calls I get. I see straight through them, but it makes me think about all the people who don't.
Ebay sends me spam emails every day. Technically I guess it doesn't count as spam because they originate from ebay.com and I "consented" by signing up an account with them, but to me they're every bit as annoying and toxic as bona-fide spam.
They have to give you an option to turn it off usual a link at the bottom of the mail.
However, never click on such a link from a real spam mail as that would tell them your email is read and you get more spam.
Here's an image: https://i.imgur.com/KqIN6oB.png
I'm about as impressed as I am mortified. I thought I had my opsec down, I was using noscript, I use throwaway email addy's where I suspect I'll be spammed.
But I was had too.
This Hecatoncheires entity is getting ever-larger. It knows a lot. It knows me well. I have seen evidence that it knows about the medication I take, the insecurities I have, my half-baked aspirations and plans. I feel defeated at times when I see its knowledge of me manifested in the ads I am shown, I feel confronted because at the time of this writing I don't know where this leak occurred, I don't know at what vector exactly I'm being had.