Generally yes but Instagram ads are somehow amazingly well-targeted towards me.
Literally every ad I say to myself "wow, that is actually something I would consider buying" and in certain instances, I have. Outside of Instagram it is exceedingly rare that I would purchase something based on an ad.
From what I keep reading on HN, Facebook ad network ads (which includes Instagram) are by far the best and most precise in terms of targeting, it doesn't even get close.
And from my anecdotal experiences, I have to agree with both you and what I see on HN in that regard. Not only they get the advertisers right up my alley, they even get the exact products I want to click on.
For a specific example: I don't get easily baited by random no-name "hip" clothing startups (that are mostly just alibaba dropship sort of places), so instagram keeps giving me ads for Adidas products as well. And the thing is, not only does it get correctly that I am likely to be interested in Adidas products, the specific products from Adidas that get suggested to me in those ads are the exact kind of products from Adidas that I would be interested in. Which is very impressive and surprising, given how wide the range of Adidas products is, and how most of their general stuff isn't super appealing to me. It is hard to describe to the point where I am struggling myself to define what exactly I am looking for if I am navigating Adidas website. But somehow Instagram ads get it right on target most of the time.
The only time when those ads let me down big time was when I saw an Adidas tracksuit advertised with the design I just liked a ton. Without looking at the details, I ordered it, only to realize a bit later that it was in "kids" section of their website, and I have no kids (and neither do I fall under the typical "people who might have kids" demographic by any metric; e.g., I don't search for any items even tangentially related to children, not a part of any FB groups that are heavily populated by parents or children, etc.). But damn, I would be lying if I said that Instagram didn't get the exact idea of what I wanted perfectly correct, sizing issues aside lol.
With the story of Target figuring out daughter was pregnant before the daughters father, it gives rise to all kinds of "Movie plot" plausible sounding scenarios.
Movie plot: Two people meet up, have fun, then go their separate ways. 9 months later she has a kid, dad doesn't know. But FAANG knows...
The problem with "plausible movie plots" is they are often overrated in terms of % chance of happening.
With linked graphs and relationship trees, it doesn't seem impossible "The Algorithm" could figure out you have kids before you do, or at least base it's Advertising results on a % chance guess.
Which is crazy, but often does happen. I have a nephew and niece, so I've bought baby / small-child stuff, but mainly just around major holidays and their birthdays. And yet I still get plenty of random product suggestions on Amazon for kid-related products, even during the 95% of the year that I'm not looking for that stuff.
I'm in the same boat, and think it's just that I don't see any typical big advertiser ads like FMCG companies, whereas the traditional media is full of them.
On the other side there are Google Play ads with mouth open guys - I'm never going to play one of those vile games, ever.
Just my anecdote, but when I used Instagram (stopped probably 2 years ago), the ad targeting was pretty terrible for me. Occasionally they would get something completely on the nose (to the point that it was a little creepy), but most of the time (>90% probably), the ads were completely irrelevant to me, either for things I already have and have no need to replace, or for things I don't think I'd ever conceivably buy.
be aware of the conversations you have in a 24hr to 48hr period, see if "targeted" ads appear in your feed, which relate to things shared in those conversations.
I've seen things go from saying things in a conversation to targeted advert on Twitter, for example, in under 1hr routinely (although not always). Many of my peers have reported the same. While I've reproduced this on multiple devices (Android + iPhone) over many tests, I've been unable to isolate the app(s) doing this and how it works.
It's baffling how it's done and at scale, but somehow a few organizations seem to have extremely advanced adtech in production.
I still don’t believe audio surveillance exists at this scale, and I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence.
It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match what I was talking about, but not so likely to notice the ads unrelated to my conversations.
There are so many ways we could detect such surveillance. Power consumption, network usage, mic activity indicators, etc. but I still have seen no such evidence.
> I still haven’t seen any evidence that these events are anything but coincidence
My feeling here is that it's just like when someone in your family buys a particular make/model of car, you start noticing the same car on the road and are surprised that you never noticed how many of them there are.
That same ad for a set of Bose headphones might show up in your feed once a week, but one of those days you just happen to have a conversation about headphones with a friend, and it feels weird.
The paranoia in me sometimes wants to believe that my phone is listening to me all the time and is extracting ad keywords from everything I say, but I have a hard time figuring out how it would work.
Uploading voice clips, even using a good compressor like Opus, would still be noticeable. Maybe not by me, personally, but someone would have noticed that by now. Doing on-device voice recognition is possible (uploads of compressed text might not be noticeable), but my intuition is that would be a huge drain on the battery if it was running all day, processing everything it hears.
But who knows. Maybe it is possible, and there's a novel, but secret technology that enables it. It's a little far-fetched, though, I think.
I had a hard time believing it myself and came to terms with it after reproducing it consistently over many months, despite using everything from pihole to on-device firewalls running as root.
Unfortunately, this topic tends to be routinely brushed off as coincidence and I believe it's partially because the level of surveillance underway would cause panic and outrage, if it becomes widely known. Although I have have exposure to adtech and ML, it's difficult to grasp how this sort of activity is being done at scale.
My current theory is audio may be heavily compressed prior to occasional uploads to a trusted domain, which could be obfuscated by cloudfront or similar service. It's also possible some on-device speech to text is happening, which would make the files trivial to upload. That said, on device ML itself would be a quite a feat, especially to be running on mobile devices with high degree of accuracy to isolate keywords to be used in prod, for ad targeting.
yet not even one whistleblower has stepped forward? Not one person has been able to detect something which would be so obviously detectable? Come on, man.
Literally every ad I say to myself "wow, that is actually something I would consider buying" and in certain instances, I have. Outside of Instagram it is exceedingly rare that I would purchase something based on an ad.