then how do you explain facebook giving people ads for stuff they say
eg. this youtuber made an experiment where he wasn't getting ads for oven and when he started saying oven multiple times, he got ads for oven https://youtu.be/-nkiPEGU_lY

[–] june@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or Facebook recommending people that I’ve talked to by text and never met irl (met on dating app, moved to text, fizzled out) when it’s not supposed to have access to my contacts.

[–] graham1@gekinzuku.com 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah but Facebook probably has access to the other person's contacts where your name and phone number were stored

[–] june@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s a good point. She popped up after she changed my contact info to my new name, which I updated on FB a few weeks ago.

Though it did happen with another girl I was talking to last year and haven’t talked to since.

[–] gizmonicus@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Assuming this isn't because the person you're contacting has lax privacy set up in their FB account, have you ever played "6 degrees of Kevin Bacon"? You (I assume) probably live near this person, are probably approximately the same age, single, you may even have some obscure friends in common. Or friends of friends. And what you don't remember are the countless recommendations that are totally off base. For every "uncanny" friend recommendation I get, there are dozens of people I don't know.

[–] gizmonicus@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The video you linked would be stupid easy to reproduce by recording a voice over after scrolling ads on Facebook for a minute. If you want to convince me, you would need to perform a controlled experiment with multiple unrelated search terms, fresh Facebook accounts with no browsing history, etc.

Or, what if this is real? Maybe the YouTuber wasn't just phishing for view counts with clickbait to boost his channel and actually did make that video in good faith and sure enough, Bluetooth speakers show up in his feed? What's to say he hasn't been seeing Bluetooth speaker ads because he's a tech inclined, middle aged man with disposable income and the opposite effect is true: maybe he subconsciously chose Bluetooth speakers because he's been seeing ads for them on Facebook recently? Our minds aren't exactly good at keeping track of that kind of thing and advertisers take advantage of that shit all the time. Look at the familiarity principle or mere exposure effect.

My point isn't to say Facebook and Google don't collect tons of data about us, they do that all the time for sure. It's just that there are simpler, more reliable and less processor intensive ways to build a behavioral model. Google knows where I work, what I search for, how old I am, how many kids I have, what YouTube videos I watch, ... There's more than enough there to figure out what kind of ads to serve me.