[kibblesalad]

Ads seem like kind of a generic and misleading term for it. It's less about showing you a flashy clip for an advertised product in the classic sense, and more about building complex personality and interest profiles on users based around their engagement patterns across sites and services. That's the real resource which organizations pay money for, especially once it gets aggregated into constantly growing targeted data collections on individual users and the increasingly monopolized share of their digital fingerprints and track records.

[macNchz]

>about building complex personality and interest profiles on users based around their engagement patterns across sites and services

Twitter very clearly thinks I'm a doctor. I am not a doctor. They show me lots of ads that are obviously oriented towards medical professionals–many of them include the language "your patients" as well as medical jargon. My wife is not a doctor, my parents aren't doctors, the only doctors I know are casual friends and family I see at most once a year. I do not have any medical conditions, and nobody I know has any of the conditions treated by the products being advertised.

I've been using Twitter at least a few times a week for several years, I follow and engage with lots of other users, none of whom are doctors as far as I know. If the ads I'm seeing are derived from this complex personality and interest profiling, it has totally misfired. This has been the case for at least two or three years.

Several years ago a conversation about a similar topic prompted me to look at the ad targeting data Facebook had on me. At the time I'd had a Facebook account for 12 years with lots of posts, group memberships and ~500 friends. Their cutting edge data collection and complex ad targeting algorithms had identified my "Hobbies and activities" as: "Mosquito", "Hobby", "Leaf" and "Species": https://imgur.com/nWCWn63. Whatever that means.

I've managed millions of dollars in ad spend on these platforms over time, and still regard most targeted ad platforms as dancing on the edge between legitimacy and being blatantly fraudulent. They work well if you're a sophisticated buyer, but if you're not they're pretty much a hole in the internet into which you can pour money.

[b112]

You are a technically competent, well versed person with stated platforms. Compared to your knowledge, the rest of our citizenry are mere peons, who have little hope of understanding, or even realising the degree with which they are tracked.

As well, most people in tech are outliers of some sort, with highly unique searches on platforms. Simply put, we are not the norm. We aren't 'norms'.

While I'm sure you're correct in stating that the accuracy of such tracking platforms is not 100%, I suspect that when it comes to those who do not understand technology? Tracking is much better, more accurate.

My position for clarity, "being able to use a phone" is not "understanding technology". Some seem to think they are tech aware, because they can navigate a phone's OS. Or use a computer for work, by using word.

These people are likely more accurately tracked, for their lack of understanding, whilst combined with their heavy usage of computing devices, makes them most susceptible to tracking.

[civilized]

YouTube thinks I'm a Latino who loves TikTok.

[eointierney]

It's* an ecology-shattering waste of resources to satisfy the profit demands of a small number of globally distributed artificial legal personalities. It's a fabulously inefficient yet monetarily useful model of pernicious theft of human attention. It's bad Physics.

* It being the Advertising "Industry"