Quote:
Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay
This seems like a good thread to ask this question as I thought I did a pretty good job of keeping my online presence minimal.
I was looking at the Lowes website on my MS Surface the other day using Chrome. Wasn't signed in to Chrome at all. No FB app on this device. Just me signed in to Windows. So I'm looking at a particular floor lamp from Lowes.
Maybe 2 hours later, my g/f is looking at FB on her phone, and what appears in her feed? An ad for the exact same lamp!
HTF does that happen?? It couldn't have been a coincidence.
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That's a good start for your privacy. And if you ever do use Facebook, make sure you sign out, otherwise they can track you all over the Internet (along with many other companies).
What you experienced with the ad for the lamp is probably something like this:
The ad company running ads on Lowe's tracked you via your IP address. Since browsing websites is a two-way communication (you ask for the site, they need somewhere to send it), the advertising code on the Lowe's website kept track that "someone at address 111.222.333.444 viewed this lamp at 6:30 PM on Dec. 6". Then later, on a different device, your GF is browsing Facebook which happens to be served by the same ad company that was tracking you on Lowe's. Since you are both at home, from the outside, your IP address is the same. So when the ad code on Facebook runs it looks up "do we have any relevant ads targeting 111.222.333.444?" and finds that just a couple hours earlier that IP address was viewing a particular lamp at Lowe's. So it dynamically creates the HTML code for displaying that lamp in an ad banner and your GF sees this ad.
Or possibly the ad code just tracked "someone from NW Calgary was viewing lamps from Lowe's. Are lamps a big thing in Calgary right now? Let's serve up ads for lamps to anyone else in NW Calgary for the next 8 hours".
And possibly even more sinister, say you agreed to share your location with Lowe's on the store locator page. And no doubt the Facebook app on your GF's phone has her location tracked down to the nearest metre. This could be another way to associate the locations across these devices.
Obviously it's even easier to show such "relevant" ads if you are on the same device since they can just track you with cookies (small bits of data stored on your computer). We all know this experience of browsing a certain product or website, then being bombarded with ads for that site/product for the next two weeks. It could also lead to some embarrassment if you are browsing with someone watching your screen (I only clicked on that Amazon product page for a
55 gallon drum of personal lubricant because someone thought it was funny to link to! Stop showing me ads for it!).
So my advice is to do your engagement ring shopping in person
, or else it might spoil the surprise. And what could be fun/scary is to start testing out how these ads are working. Hit up Lowe's again for some random product, and see if that is advertised on your GF's phone again.