At least they aren't showing you something you would be tempted to buy?

That's not always good. If I am looking for a kind of product, and an ad recommends a possibly better product that I didn't know about, both sides benefit from it.

It seems they don't know you already bought it, which... maybe they don't and do you want them to?

This happens on places like amazon too, that know I bought a toaster, then show me sponsored results for 50 more toasters.

[delayed]

If I buy a car, I get flushed with ads for cars. Really. Same for an area rug, a vacuum cleaner, and many other things I will never buy two in a row of.

That's just stupid.

that’s literalist what they know. it’s called retargeting and it’s the point of these ad systems, to track what people buy to understand how to link buying patterns to other info about people

You want them to advertise things you won’t buy; that’s far less bad than them advertising things you shouldn’t buy but might if pushed, which is the ultimate goal of the corporate mind control machine.

You think of it as the corporate mind control machine. I think of it as "oh, I am looking for a new car and completely forgot Subaru is also making cars that fit my profile - I should test drive them as well".

The op was complaining that that is not happening. Maybe a Subaru WRX is perfect for you, maybe you really need a Honda Fit and the WRX kinda technically fits if you force it and the ads mislead you into thinking you need horsepower and awd car for your temperate zone inner city shopping trips.

The issue of you already buying something is interesting to me. It’s so obvious that they’d fix it if it cause revenue loss. My guess is that conversion for any ad is so low that you’re indeed more likely to buy a lot of products twice rather than buying something totally different.

No, it's really difficult for 'them' to find out whether you actually purchased something. All the tracking stuff is on social media and the product browsing pages. But not on checkout. Shopping sites can't allow all that stuff there because of security and privacy issues. So big tech doesn't even know whether you bought something. They only know what you have seen. That's why they keep showing it.

Conversion tracking is not merely a thing, I'm under the extremely strong impression that it's standard.

The owner of the shopping site can do it. They know which campaign lead to a sell.

But I have never heard of them passing it on to whatever 3rd party trackers they have on their sites. THAT would be a privacy violation.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't want my computer suggesting anything to me unless I ask it for suggestions. A computer should be essentially a REPL. It waits for a command. The user inputs its command. The computer processes it. Then the computer loops back to wait. Now we have all sorts of nice GUIs and modes of interaction, but essentially the computer should behave that way: The user should tell it what to do, and it should only do what the user wants.

Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.

We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.