This is like how you get a million ads about dishwashers the day after you Google around and buy one. At least wait for a short duration of time to let the target run out of medicine before adversiting new stuff.

Consider: one of the hardest parts about advertising is figuring out when someone is ready to buy the product. That is why car companies bombard ads everywhere, just to catch you in the rare moment when you may be buying a car. Lets guess that maybe the odds of a random person wanting to buy a dishwasher is 1 in a million.

Now consider someone who has just bought a dishwasher. What are the odds they need a new one or a second one? Maybe the one they bought is a few cm too tall/wide/deep. Maybe it came broken on arrival. What are the odds here? I have no data, but I would guess like 1 in ten thousand.

The odds of you buying a dishwasher and then needing to buy another are much better than the odds of someone wanting to buy a dishwasher in the first place, because the hard part is finding people who want to buy a dishwasher.

Something like 30% of purchased products (including appliances) are DOA or returned.

The follow-on advertising is hoping to capture your replacement activity.

People really do return major appliances though. Perhaps dishwashers less frequently than refrigerators, though people never fail to surprise me.

I think once your dishwasher breaks, the time you are “live” to buy is closer to a week :). Also it is (maybe?) harder to identify a person with a broken dishwasher than one who just bought one and may need another.

"A standard dishwasher is about 24 inches wide, 24 inches deep and 35 inches high. Most cabinet openings are made to fit a standard dishwasher size. Note that certain handles may affect the overall dishwasher depth. Oversized dishwashers are built wider than the standard opening."

they come in three sizes compact standard and custom.

Also, completely unrelatedly, if you saw some armchair internet rando claim they'd debunked a major and long-standing business strategy of market sector leader, how seriously would you take them?

Business is subject to fads and stupidies, we have proof that open officez are a net negative, yet businesses continue. We have proof that getting people to change passwords every month is bad for security, but its still policy in many places. We have proof that using basalt or stainless rebar in RCC is more cost effective in the long run, but bs still continues.

For urban life multiple doesn't make sense. For professional/rural it really does.

At a certain point in my life, one where I sought fewer material comforts (and had less media exposure), I used to claim that advertising won't convince me to buy anything but it may convince me not to. There is a very fine line between persuasion and overstepping ethical boundaries.

And it kind of makes sense if you think about it... really, what are the consequences of seeing these silly over-recommendations? Did you stop buying from Amazon? I bet the vast majority of people shrug or laugh, but don’t change habits.

Also, big one-time purchases tend to be rare, so optimizing a recommendation system around those is probably suboptimal compared to optimizing it around frequent consumable purchases.

Or you tell all your friends about it and end up having a conversation about guitars/dishwashers or whatever.

It may not be intentional on their part, but spin off conversations can be a nice by-product for them. Feels like it helps it stick in the mind, a bit like writing a witty TV ad.

They’ve conflated “most purchases of a toilet seat are made by someone who buys another” and “most people who buy one toilet seat buy a second”.

There’s a small, but high volume group of toilet seat purchases — eg, office buildings or apartment maintenance.

P(buying crap) < P(buying crap | has bought crap before)

Advertising is applied statistics and works on large cohorts. Nobody cares about you personally or your psychology.

Thus far, the clearest signal for answering the question "will I buy a mechanical keyboard in the next few days?" is "did I just buy mechanical keyboard?"

https://www.shopify.com/retail/examples-of-great-post-purcha...

Also in general I've noticed there are a lot of people that return online purchases a lot, even the non broken ones, since you can't determine if the clothing fits, if the colors really look good, if it has a good texture, from pictures and descriptions online.

They may not be good customers, but Google probably gets money per purchase, not for customer quality.

That clicks all adds for you. Maybe it can be modified somehow to click already bought item?

* Big businesses are unaffected as they use click fraud prevention services.

* Businesses that don’t use that have to pay more money to Google because people clicked on their ad, and they think their marketing is effective (at least from a click through perspective).

* Google makes even more money because you are clicking on all the ads and it makes them look better. They can demonstrate how well their marketing platform works even better!

... or not. Maybe their recommender systems have simply decided that buying product X is highly correlated with buying product Y where Y = X. Who knows? Probably not even google itself knows.

Also, remember that google is not trying to sell you anything, they're only trying to maximise adoption of their ad platform by advertisers. Who cares what you actually buy? Not Google.

Other comment explains it though: Many people return the dishwasher or screwdrivers (they might have ordered several) - Amazon wants to make sure you buy with them (though my account history should show that I practically never return things because I hate getting returned things as new).

Personal anecdote: Recently I cancelled an order because a better product was shown in ads post-purchase.

For medicinal products I’d be keen to see research on whether a treatment group being re-targeted would report better efficiency of a treatment than a non-retargeted control.

Also, this person is now in a certain class of shopper (I think some this may be Experian Mosaic classes), so the advertiser knows what quality level of dishwasher this person is buying. The cheapest kitchen applicances, or premium kitchen applicances? Premium kitchen applicances on credit or premium kitchen applicances full price?

This will have a massive effect of choice of other items to advertize, the difference between ads for loans (credit purcahse) or ads for international holidays (full price purchase).

It throws dust into eyes of advertising efficiency measurement.

Company pays for ads, and Google just sizes the ad impressions to what it can find.

Why is this even a thing? Maybe I should just go back to buying everything with cash, it's impossible to keep up with all the crap we need to disable or hack around

Maybe they are sick of surveillance capitalism and don't wish to be part of it?

I'd do the same, but I really don't want a flip phone. Maybe once Pine Phone with GNU/Linux is working reasonably well, I'll switch to that.

I bought a locally made KaiOS phone but it has too low RAM and keep crashing.

Nokia makes flip phones with KaiOS but they aren't allowed in my country sadly.

Reason is I want a phone I can repair myself, all my previous phones I had to replace because some unrepairable part that didn't need to be unrepairable (one of them it was the battery!) broke down.

Instead of shelling a ton of money to be tracked and buy a product that won't last, I wish I could spend my phone on something that will last.

And the flip cover is convenient for me because I keep forgetting to lock my phone and managed to pocket dial even with an android.

Its reducing the attack surface as I see it.

I guess this is one of the things that just has to be forbidden by law.

[0] https://www.mastercard.co.uk/en-gb/vision/terms-of-use/commi...

The page is super vague, and the question remains if they can fully anonymise the data, but if they can, it's allowed. Personal data is covered under the GDPR, while anonymous data isn't [0].

[0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Ok Nat west has Coutts but not just any euro trash millionaire can get an account there

And some agencies may be more interested in these exclusion databases. So I don't think there is any way to get out of this maze. When you sign up to exclude from a list, you get included in many other.

The question is what unintended (and specifically undesirable) consequences that poses to the members of the list.

You should.

Better to focus on privacy laws.

So this isn't covered by the 1-3% transaction fee the merchant pays every time you use your card?

>Most consumers are okay with this trade off

No they aren't. Most consumers aren't even aware they are paying with their privacy, so you cannot take a low opt-out rate to mean high levels of consent.

PS: this is really a response to grandparent poster, not parent.

Your friends, family, and coworkers might though, so the critical mass of people not okay with this can still grow :)

As debit cards became popular here (well after Europe) the banks push them hard on people who aren't excellent credit risks (good credit risks = profit), because they push essentially all the risk onto the account holder and absolve the banks of any responsibility.

I have three CCs (one of each major network) and pay them off every month; it's like having three debit cards except I get a free loan of a month's worth of spending. The term used in the banking business for people like me is "deadbeat"

AFAIK the main reason people prefer CC’s over debit cards for fraud prevention is simply that with a debit card your money comes out immediately if it is used by someone else, whereas with a CC there is a 30-day buffer.

The TL;DR is:

- you have a short window to report DC fraud before you bear the full risk; CC risk is capped

- dispute a CC charge: you don’t owe anything / accrue interest until resolved; DC case you don’t get any money back until bank decides it’s not your fault. Tough luck if you needed that money to pay your rent.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0213-lost-or-stolen-cr...

https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/are-credit-cards...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/credit-cards/credit-card-...

https://creditcards.usnews.com/articles/why-credit-cards-are...

https://komonews.com/sponsored/wafd/financial-focus-tips/cre...

If you have the patience and knowledge, I can't recommend this enough. If you don't have the patience and the knowledge, this is a good way to end up with a non-functioning phone. (It will probably be recoverable, provided that you have the patience to acquire that knowledge and don't mind being without a phone in the meantime.)

When I say I can't recommend it enough, I mean it. I have been okay with simply disabling Google services for the past few years, yet Google seems to be embedding their services deeply in applications like Phone, Messages, Contacts, and Files. It is at the point where these applications would throw up a stream of notifications when Google services were disabled on Android 10. Even though they appeared to be usable, they are clearly trying to annoy people into re-enabling Google services.

If you want the above, but also want access to Google Play apps, then install CalyxOS.

The third option is LineageOS (was originally CyanogenMod back in the day). This custom ROM is the most accessible for a variety of devices. It's good for privacy, but, because the bootloader is left unlocked (which may or may not be relevant depending on your threat model), it is the least secure of the three.

Both GrapheneOS and CalyxOS have very user-friendly installation methods, but exist primarily for the Pixel line of devices. LineageOS has the most involved installation process, but it's available for the widest variety of Android devices.

I've installed all three ROMs on several different devices. For the average person, CalyxOS will probably be the best bet (though I think the Trebuchet launcher in LineageOS is better).

What I will suggest is looking at the device specific forums at XDA. You will get an idea of what is available and what is reliable. Personally, I shy away from distributions that don't include a "what works" and "what doesn't work" section in the first post. I also prefer "official" distributions. At the very least, it is easier to track updates. The next filter I use is feature based. In this context, look for distributions that don't include Gapps and offer additional privacy enhancing features. Once you have something that you think you want, read the thread for the distribution. It often reveals pitfalls, variations within the model, and variations between carriers. These pitfalls exist even with the popular distributions, which is another reason to check out the forums.

I went with OmniROM this time around, but I have been happy with Resurrection Remix on other devices. Some devices have nice alternatives that are specific to them. As an example, I use KatKiss on the Asus TF300T. For a while, it was running a more recent version of Android than my much newer phone!

You need a non-Verizon version of the device to do so, but there are services out there that'll hunt the devices down and even install the OS for you if you lack the time/patience https://grapheneos.org/ https://noagendaphone.com/

https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal...

> Google’s third-party partnerships ... capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States

See also https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an... and https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no... - Google has deals with the credit card providers to get purchase data so they can link them back to your online behavior.

Geolocation is not very accurate from gps, so unless the store was off in a field by itself that’s not what happened here.

The only real way to avoid this happening would be to use a new credit card for each purchase, with a fake name/billing address.

I mean, if you have to try and double-guess your phone to make sure it's not spying on you the game is lost. I don't even know what game that is. But it's lost.

> U.S cardholders may opt out of Visa using their card transaction data for VAS, a suite of aggregated data products in the United States.

So while outside of US, I don't get the perks like cashabacks and no privacy either!

> We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.

Oh yeah, and Google frames asking for a birthdate as being "in order to comply with the law". They are deliberately ambiguous in order to imply that it is me who could be breaking the law, rather than Google. Also, the law only requires verifying age, and doesn't require storing the birthdate afterwards. That one is entirely on Google.

So overall, my trust in anything that Google claims is rather low.

If you are referring to reading email for ad targeting, you are correct that dishonesty in one area doesn't necessarily imply dishonestly in another. However, it does mean that a person or entity loses the benefit of the doubt, and must have independent verification of their claims.

I don't trust Google. They are evil.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-stop-reading-users-em...

Also, hiding order info is a way to push you back to the store to engage in more Amazon ads.

If you're using a store card, the merchant == the CC company and so knows everything about you anyways.

If you're not using the store card, the merchant probably has an agreement with the CC company to share the information, so the technical implementation is irrelevant.

Which means no push, breaking an absurd amount of apps.

Is there no way to get GPS location, without sending it to Google? As I understand, GPS positioning does not require the phone to send any data?

But it does "work". iPhone is the only phone besides a GrapheneOS phone with an intact security model worth writing about.

Their incentive is to not annoy their rich & powerful customer base with privacy violations.

Apple knows how much they can get away with annoying, that's why they can push updates that slow down your phone, or make devices less repairable.

Privacy is trickier though because it's based on trust not annoyance and it doesn't take much to lose it. I've already lost trust in Apple. What I do trust is that 'privacy' is currently working for Apple to increase their market share. It also conveniently keeps data away from competitors.