Cookies, browsers? Something around ip addresses, just extremely confused
In: Engineering
Badly. Really really badly. Every time I buy something I get six months at least of ads for the thing I already have. I once bought a pan from a restaurant supply store (14 inch induction ready fry pans are thin on the ground); I’ve had over a year of “let us design your restaurant” ads, and about six months of ads for an advertising company. The mistargeting would be a clear don’t buy signal if I were a possible customer.
I cannot count how often I’ve clicked on an ambiguous thumbnail and gotten months of crap about fire suppression or machine tools.
You go to facebook and like a post about cars. Now facebook knows you are interested in cars.
Facebook is not only a social media platform but one of the biggest advertising platfomrs too, so any advertiser can now pay facebook money to show everyone who likes cars their ad.
Thats targeting people who are interested in cars.
To keep track who you are, facebook can store a cookie in your browser that it can later read to see you are the same person.
Advertising on sites is handled through companies called “exchanges.”
Your personal information (location, interests, age range, gender, political leaning, etc.) is gathered by websites you visit and sold to exchanges.
Websites have sections where ads are displayed, and the ad to be displayed is chosen by the exchange based on the information that particular exchange knows about you (based on calculations about which ad you’re most likely to click).
Cookies are one of the ways websites keep track of you so that multiple visits to the same sites can be tied to you, allowing them to build up this profile of who you are over time.
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