Amazon and adverts

yellowmoon23

I find personalised advertising on the internet to be incredibly annoying.  It’s the cat’s birthday, so I go looking, while she supervises, for a rodent delivery service, something offering more than the usual mouse or rat she finds.  She has her eye on a coypu.  So, i look up Coypu, next thing Amazon inundate me with adverts for coypu related items, things I have no intention of buying.  

So, a while back I read an article on turning off personalised advert tracking, amazon.co.uk/adprefs takes you to the settings, and altered the settings to switch it off.

i was reading about a new RFID blocking wallet someone has come up with, I’ve got one, but wanted to read about new features, etc.  Next thing, targeted advertising from Amazon about RFID blocking wallets.  I checked my settings on Amazon, all set to no tracking, but they’re doing it anyway?  So, I reported them to themselves about scam emails.

i was looking at a very posh white cane, from Germany, but it’s, sit down for this, the basic cane is €599.00 and the different tips are between €69.00 and €99.00.  Given they give you one when you qualify to use it, it’s an extravagance beyond my means, but I am sure they’ll be sending me targeted adverts.

i could report them to the ombudsman, but they are toothless tigers who, in my experience, side with the offenders. 

Is it just me?  But shouldn’t there be more protection for customers from sellers?  I know a person who suffers with shopping addiction issues, emails such as these can  trigger her to acquire a shelf of RFID wallets, ones for which she has no use as she put herself further in debt buying the things!

I don’t object to adverts for things I want, with me it’s vinyl records, railway books, and cat related items, but .i specifically sign up for those.  I’m not surveilled constantly for others to decide.  Before being forced into retirement I worked in this field, I know just how insidious these corporations are, at one giant supermarket client I once joked about with the data they gather they could probably stop you at the door, hand you your shopping, even when you thought you were popping in randomly. A senior manager said “We can, we have looked into that, but it’s only about 80% accurate, that’s not good enough, yet”.  That was 12 years ago!  They know better than you when you’re going to run out of loo roll, butter, milk, toothpaste, healthcare products, etc.  The Stasi weren’t that intrusive.

Personally, I prefer a quiet life, left to cope, do my own thing, but be able to ask, and wasn’t that a hard lesson to learn, when I need help.  Not have my nose rubbed in things endlessly.

Discuss, show your workings, extra marks for diagrams, 20 points.

chiarieds

I have used DuckDuckGo, which is a free browser, for years - this puts an end to internet tracking. You can read about it here: https://duckduckgo.com/

66Mustang

I haven’t seen an advert for ages as I have them all blocked but if I had to look at adverts I think I’d rather see stuff that’s at least vaguely relevant to me

Don't really care about tracking - no private business has any access to my important info, only trivial data - and the only people who could access my important data are authorities, who aren't interested in it anyway because I'm not a terrorist

Though, several years ago we had a new bathroom then for several months afterwards my parents kept seeing adverts for bathroom appliances - I know computers are based on binary code and algorithms and stuff, rather than any conscious logic, but surely it doesn’t take much to realise that just after someone’s bought a new sink, is precisely the time they aren’t going to be looking for another one for a good 15 years  

That said, I would argue that only having adverts for things you actually want is more or less totally defeating the point of advertising. If you have already made the decision that you want something, why would a company need to convince you to buy it?

rubin16

I don't get ads, I have a strong ad blocker in place and also use duckduckgo so I can't be tracked. I don't get any adverts from any site as it auto blocks them. It also blocks adverts on any video.

If you're using chrome (which is google made and owned) it will massivley track your habits and browsing history and sell your data for advertisement. Its how google make money and basically stores everyones data and sells it to companies. Its scary if you dive deep into what google actually collects on people, for example if you own an android, or any google app installed on your devices and say you want a certain product google is always listening and will put an advert for that product. You have to ensure that it doesn't do this by turning your mics off or unplugging them when not in use. Google is one of the biggest companies to collect and store peoples data, they know everything about everyone unless you fight back and put protections in place.

The things I have learned over the years doing cybersecurity and researching things, the internet is a scary place if you don't know how to fully protect yourself on it.