[joshuamorton]

What you're describing isn't an advertisement, so isn't at all relevant to the discussion.

It's well known (and not at all secret) that google will grab upcoming flight info from emails and put it into your calendar. But this info still isn't used for ad targeting.

[toss1]

Thanks for the explanation.

However, I was describing the deceptive advertisement that came along with the flight->calendar populating feature (which is fine).

The advertisement that Google added to my calendar was an auto-populated fake hotel reservation.

It was setup to look as if I'd previously reserved rooms but had simply failed to confirm the final ccard info -- the click-thru literally went straight to the enter ccard info page with my "reservation" prepopulated.

This was trying to hijack any other reservation that I might have intended to make (of course it was really obvious to me since we were staying w/relatives).

Let's be clear:

Adding a "need a hotel?" link to my calendar might be ok.

Populating my calendar with an item for a business I've never even contacted is an advertisement.

Falsely claiming I've already made a reservation when I've never even contacted the business is a lie. It is a deceptive practice.

I was genuinely surprised to see this level of both advertising and deception from Google.

[joshuamorton]

What you're describing is a bug. It may be due to something you did and didn't realize, it may be due to something the site you were reserving things on did and didn't realize, it may be due to a bug in how Calendar parses reservation emails. But its a bug somewhere along the process. It's not an intentional advertisement.

So you're being downvoted for claiming to have been the target of an unrealistic sounding advertisement campaign that, it seems, no one else has ever been targeted by. This, at Google scale, is pretty unlikely.

To give a recent similar example from HN, a user was complaining that google was incorrectly tracking their watch history on YouTube. In reality, they had been infected with malware that watched YouTube videos in the background. Your story gives me the same vibe, and that's likely why people are downvoting.

[toss1]

A bug was my first thought too. Except:

I had never made a reservation, never even searched for a hotel, as we were staying with relatives. So, there is zero chance that it had anything to do with other searches or reservation attempts, and the flights were made directly at the airline site (i.e., not through Google Flights or a travel aggregator).

The advert populated in the same time-frame as the flight; the airline's flight confirmation email to my Gmail acct had clearly been was parsed, and there was nothing in the email having to do with a hotel.

Moreover, when I clicked thru and found the menus, Google settings pages were there, offering to enable/disable the feature, along with describing that the "helpful" auxiliary reservation feature could not be turned off separately, and providing a feedback opportunity.

My recollection is that this advertisement itself also came with a google message about how this was a helpful new feature to complete my travel palns.

Obviously I turned it off, and slammed them in the feedback, in particular how I couldn't manage the sub-features (actual vs advertised reservations) separately.

Neither item ever happened again, which I would expect having turned off the feature. Which also indicates that this was something under Google's control as opposed to an infection or bug.

My guess is that this is a short-lived experiment, gathered a lot of the kind of feedback I gave, and was cut off by one of their smarter managers.

[the-rc]

This is not "advertising and deception from Google", it's a spam/scam/phishing campaign.

https://www.wired.com/story/phishing-links-google-calendar-i...

Similar attacks have been directed at iCloud users, too.

[toss1]

Plausible, but unlikely

1) This occurred in exactly the same set of minutes since the email direct from the airline arrived and Google parsed it and posted the flight info to my calendar

2) The hotel locations and dates for the fake reservation were exactly matched to the airline travel dates.

It is also possible to win the lottery, but to post such an exactly targeted advertisement is for all practical purposes impossible without access to the email. Only three parties had access to it: The airline, me, and Google.

[the-rc]

Ok, three parties... And it wasn't a shady link in the airline's email?

https://support.google.com/calendar/forum/AAAAd3GaXpEb0_0F6e...

[toss1]

It is plausible, but I do have scripting & images shut off in my email client, use NoScript in the browser to prevent unknown scripts from executing (where I do sometimes read Gmail), and saw no such link. If Google is executing them on the server side, I've lost control.

The other indication against this is that this only appeared at the same time as the auto-populate for flights appeared, and never after I turned off that service. Yet, I've received many flight confirmations from the same airline.

So, it would have had to have been a short-lived shady link deal between the hotel & airline at exactly the time that Google started auto-populating the flights, then dropped. Possible, and important to consider, but...