Everyone thinks this problem is really annoying, but to me it's a good sign - it indicates the current technical capabilities on using and abusing personal information is still limited, the predicted machine learning apocalypse is not here yet. In other words: despite the large quantity of personal information collected by advertisers, they still cannot exploit it efficiently enough, so far all they can do mostly is showing you the same things over and over - advertisers are still unable to develop a perfectly manipulative algorithm that makes you buy things (edit: or they have it, but it's still not found in wider deployment).
Effectiveness of targeted ads directly translates to effectiveness of mass surveillance. Perhaps we should enjoy the useless shopping recommendations from Amazon for now. When every single shopping recommendations made by the algorithm is the thing you always wanted (coming soon!), you'll know the cyberpunk dystopia is officially here.
This point of view also reconciles the two different opinions on machine learning in the tech community. The first person tells you that it's nothing but overhyped marketing, while it has some specialized uses, but everything is exaggerated as "AI" to get money from VCs, and in many areas, it's effectiveness is just too limited. The second person warns you that collecting personal information at an industrial scale is extremely dangerous, with the recent progress on "AI", they can use your data against you in ways never possible before. These two are not a contradiction: The first view is where we were previously, and the next view is where we are going to.
I don't think it is a good sign.
I think it shows that, even if your personal information is quietly being abused, individual businesses will still prioritise spamming you.
So, even if you willingly give up your personal information in exchange for personalised ads, you will never see the claimed benefit to you.
One side of the contract is broken.
Targetted ads are considerably more effective, even if they are annoying.
When you 'buy' something, generally you get the 'benefit' of the surplus.
The ads very effectiveness is a rough measure of their economic benefit, even to you.
How we 'emotional feel' about ads that seem to track is is not really a measure of that. It's just annoying.
How effective is spam? From the perspective of the spammer, it's effective enough.
In both cases, these forms of "business" are certainly effective in annoying a large number of people, a tradeoff the operators apparently deem worthy of making.
> advertisers are still unable to develop a perfectly manipulative algorithm that makes you buy things (edit: or they have it, but it's still not found in wider deployment).
Perhaps the expensive processor time or R&D just doesn't worth it...
Yet (But it's coming soon?).
Does it really though? I would expect a successfully manipulative algorithm to be much more subtle than this; just because we don't notice it, doesn't mean it's not there.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
If this is what Target does in 2012, Amazon in 2020 not only inserts plausible deniability to optimize for lack-of-creepiness factor. They're probably running AI bots on forums and social media injecting seamless product placement in commentary you see in your browser.
Assuming you're correct about the technical points of efficacy, we can still turn this around as a social problem and hypothesize that the willingness to use unproven, annoying targeted ads directly correlates to the willingness to use intrusive mass surveillance.
You bought a vacuum here are more vacuums might directly translate to you attended a protest so you're a permanent malcontent. Worse yet, the "metrics" of social monitoring aren't as black-and-white as future purchases, so badly-used surveillance might falsely think itself useful simply through confirmation biases.
Basically, applied sociology.
They can't get that directly with the current state of the Internet, so they have to rely on hacks.
What we're evolving is predators of human state of mind. For every well-understood target audience there is an optimal revenue extraction method. With more data new sub-audiences appear, allowing experiments to find even more effective advertising for maximizing revenue extraction in those subgroups.
A huge fraction of advertising is nothing more than gaslighting us into believing we have a need or desire for a product or service. The other fraction is exploiting biases in our brains to influence our purchasing decisions toward particular brands or markets.
Advertisers want reproducible results backed by science and numbers. And the only way to get that today is with old-fashioned statistics - normal distrubutions, laws of large numbers and carefully controlled sample selection processes.
Nowhere here does the sci-fi of "mind control" factor.
Or ... perhaps they do this selectively to quiet the informed few :)
It's annoying because: The ads are extremely disctracting: I can't help but notice them. They look like they for the same game the last 500 ads were for with a reskin. And I haven't played a mobile game since 2012 and facebook is supposed to be able to track all of this right?
The other ads are for womans clothes or shoes which is reasonably accurate. But you need almost zero tracking to determine that I might be receptive to online clothes store. (I'm not, I buy clothes in persons because sizing is hard)
I also once got ads from Jordan Pertsons thing... WOW HOW WRONG CAN IT GET
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/
Facebook is a pretty high profile website, so it is unlikely that UBlock Origin won't block all adds there (I don't use Facebook myself, so I can't verify). In a normal desktop browser that is.
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/fnkwa4/facebo...
There is new-ish one that might work.
EDIT: No, now it's only the text that identifies it as "Sponsored" the rest of the ad does not disappear.
EDIT2: For an example here is how the word "Sponsored" is represented in the DOM:
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aria-label="Sponsored" aria-labelledby="jsc_c_cn"></span><span
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style="position: absolute; top: 3em;">d</span></span></span>Sadly this sounds like it's perfectly WAI.
> I also once got ads from Jordan Pertsons thing... WOW HOW WRONG CAN IT GET
I mean, what's wrong with that from a marketing perspective? He has a fair few female fans so the targeting can't be that wrong.
Buying a vacuum, returning it, and buying a different one is less profit than just keeping the first vacuum, so I don't see why they'd want to encourage this.
ie these systems have multiple customers, you, and the ad or marketplace sellers, and the behaviour of serving up ads for things youve already bought is happening to milk the advertisers/marketplace sellers?
a) they've got a model that has learned that people who buy X tend to buy X again, and
b) they don't have a model that can properly distinguish between classes of X for which this is true and classes of X for which it isn't. They are aware of the problem and have made several attempts to fix it over the years but the results have never been sufficiently compelling to incorporate into the actual recommendation model in prod
They wanted to print an appropriate coupon after someone paid for their shopping. "£1 off hamburgers next week" or similar, to get the person to return to the shop the following week.
They said a very important feature was to avoid giving a discount for a product someone has just bought or a closely related product. This would annoy customers who felt they'd missed out. Therefore, they were updating Neo4J with the just-made purchases and calculating the recommendation in the time it took to process the payment.
Maybe Amazon's chaotic mess of similar products makes this much more difficult than for a large supermarket, or maybe Amazon doesn't think the annoyance is a big deal.
I think amazon.com is no longer day one if it ever really was. I've seen at least one instance where they lowered price and refused to price match sale that hasn't even been delivered yet. I think they have data shows that not all people will go through the hassle to return and rebut and/or there's enough lock-in that amazon.com does not care about frustrating users.
Maybe the people who would be frustrated would go through the hassle to return and buy again. I mean if you have prime and you haven't opened the box, it is just two more days.
Yes, they're commonly bought together, but there's mostly, if not completely, a one-directional relationship-- someone buying 13 might want 14, 15, 16, but not the other way around.
This feels like it's just a matter of adding one more signed value to the "people who buy A buy B" record table... a weight indicating if the take is mostly A->B, B->A, or neutral.
Your profile has "interested in vacuum cleaners" and then the ad system monetizes this fact by selling ads to vacuum cleaner companies. The ad system makes money every time you see one.
These algorithms work on statistical foundations, and the probability of you buying a vacuum cleaner if you already bought one is always higher than the probability for a randomly sampled person from the general population.
Of course, if you bought a vacuum and returned one, that would be the ultimate targeting point. I don't know if "they just returned a vacuum cleaner" is a datum provided to advertisers.
It also might be that people usually don't return it until they've chosen one that they think would be better (possibly ordering the new one, even waiting until they receive it and trying it out before starting the return process).
Out of curiosity I clicked - "Out of Stock". No surprise here, because there were literally less than 10 units in my country sent in one batch, but why advertise it then?
This is one thing I don't understand, even though I know it must obviously work (to be clear, I'm not disputing it works. I just don't understand why/how). I know their purpose is to "remind you" Coca Cola exists, but unlike with junk removal services, you will never "need" Coca Cola and either you like it or you don't. People who like Coca Cola tend to drink it regardless of ads (some are addicts), and don't need the reminder. People who dislike Coca Cola won't ever drink it and the "need" will never exist in the future, unlike with junk removal.
So again, what's the rationale for these ads? Who needs a reminder that Coca Cola exists? I bet they are data-driven and their studies show that people do consume more soft drinks after seeing these ads everywhere -- I'm not disputing this -- but I really don't understand why it works.
Maybe the target is young kids exposed to these ads for the first time? But in general, the people in Coca Cola ads look like teenagers or in the 20-30 age segment, not kids.
(I know Coca Cola is terrible for your health and I keep telling myself I'll just stop drinking it. Maybe some day I will...)
Also, I think Coca-Cola is completely disgusting and you'd have to pay me quite a lot of money for me to agree to ingest the stuff, so maybe I'm not a very typical consumer. The fact that I know it's literally a poison to my body, in most plain sense (and probably yours too) doesn't help either :)
Buyers Stockholm Syndrome or post-purchase rationalization.
The problem is, it's hard to distinguish for an algorithm. Vacuums no, but tools or kitchen gadgets, maybe
I'm an avid consumer but I believe my interests are best served by a pull model where I research the things I want to get best in class. Then anything that spends an excessive amount of effort on advertising is wasting their budget which could go toward a better product and lower prices! So that helps me avoid advertising driven products, as well as advertising. #winning :D
Those Vacuum and First Aid ads are probably 10x more effective than random ads.
Randomly showing ads for people is actually not economical in most ways.
Showing ads for stuff that people have randomly bought, probably is.
It 'feels' annoying because totally random ads don't jump out at you, while the targeted ads do - you notice them.
Ironically, it's the very fact that you notice them gives hints as to why they are powerful.
If I bought a vaccum maybe I want vacuum accessories, or vacuum bags (if it's not a reusable), or maybe I want more appliances for the house, and so on.
The 'middle ground' is literally 'bought vacuum -> show vacuum' - and it works.
People are emotional about this stuff and aren't thinking about it in terms of behaviour, response etc..
Some things are negative, toxic, this one is just innocuous: you only notice the vacuum ad because you bought one. Otherwise, it would be a completely random ad for something you truly don't care about and you wouldn't notice it.
It's actually technically more efficient to show you stuff 'you might want to buy' than stuff you 'don't even care about a tiny bit'.
Edit: I should add - you see ads for generic products all day long - in fact probably the least value-creating ads are those for really well established brands. Crest toothpaste, laundry detergent etc it has not improved materially in decades (small things maybe) and yet they spend billions on packaging, positioning, huge ads etc.. And yet for some reason it doesn't quite bother us.
And that tactic does increase sales for Amazon, on average. Their endless split testing would have long proven that.
At some point Amazon ran tests to see whether this stuff worked and realised that it did - they'd probably see the same results sending emails and ads that are just a big Amazon logo.
Also, how much of that 1.5T is because of AWS?
Now I don't think Amazon is stupid so there must be a reason for this experience.
I also think they know something we don't.
Advertizing works. even on those thar believe themselves immune.
Far more smart systems already exist and are already used to sway people on a large scale.
The smartest system might not be the most profitsble for the intermediate add platform owner, so in those cases you might be on the receiving end of 'stupid' adds because it means more profit for the platform owner.
> Amazon is a $250 billion dollar company that reacts to you buying a vacuum by going THIS GUY LOVES BUYING VACUUMS HERE ARE SOME MORE VACUUMS
For a personal example, some months back I bought a pair of identical first aid kits (one for home, one for car), and Amazon still thinks that endlessly recommending me tourniquets, splints, medical scissors, and tactical trauma kits is somehow going to result in more sales.