Thread

1. jhhh · 1789951981 · focus · HN ↗

   Part of the reason I stopped using facebook is, beyond the content being terrible, it was super creepy that they would show me ads for things I searched for on other sites. I even have facebook in its own container, but it must have some additional tracking available because it would still know that I was searching for exact clothing brands, college apparel, trips, etc. I already saw gemini integrate some information about me into an answer recently and am getting the feeling I won't be using it much longer. I'm not surprised openAI is going to try to make money similarly. Gross.

   1. stingraycharles · 1789952839 · focus · HN ↗

      This is a very common practice called retargeting / behavioral targeting and has existed for about 2 decades at this point. Facebook is hardly the only company that does this.

      Modern browsers are more strict towards third party cookies, but there are plenty of ways to work around this.

   2. NothingAboutAny · 1789956151 · focus · HN ↗

      I was talking about changing banks with my spouse, the following two weeks I get podcast ads and Samsung TV ads about the bank I mentioned. I use all the usual off the shelf "dont track me" stuff like a pihole and a "resit fingerprinting" Firefox fork and a VPN and everything else. I'm not amazed it still somehow got me, just sad.
   3. saghm · 1789956897 · focus · HN ↗

      I've never worked in adtech (and hopefully never will), but the first idea that would pop into my head for trying to track people who sequestered their cookies like this would be to have the sites who put in the third-party cookies include the IP address. If only one Facebook account is known to log into that IP, you know who it belongs to, even when there's no active login.

      I imagine that people actively trying to make money off stuff like this would have come up with plenty more ideas than just this one.

      1. grepfru_it · 1789958314 · focus · HN ↗

         I made a browser extension that opens every tab to a proxy with a new ip address. I have a /25 at home that will keep my browsing more or less anonymous these days. I have another 200 ip addresses available through my colo, but a non residential address limits a lot of sites

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