This episode of Security Now covered Google’s plan to deprecate third party cookies and the reaction from advertising organizations and websites.
The articles and the opinions of the show hosts are that it may have negative or unintended consequences as rather than relying on Google’s proposed ad selection scheme being run on the client side (hiding information from the advertiser), instead they are demanding first party information from the sites regarding their user’s identification.
The article predicts that rather than privacy increasing, a majority of websites may demand user registration so they can collect personal details and force user consent to provide that data to advertisers.
What’s your opinion of website advertising, privacy, and data collection?
- Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
- What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
- Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
- Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
- Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
- Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
I vehemently oppose Google having hegemony over web standards, but I’ll still happily enjoy the delicious schadenfreude of propagandists – excuse me, “advertisers” – getting screwed by that hegemony.
Google having hegemony over web standards
You’re not wrong here. I think chrome browser is basically the Defacto browser, and it obviously allows google to do whatever it wants. Not great. The Mozilla / Brave options are barely that. I struggle to even all them competitors at this point.
I definitely appreciate some of the EU’s recent privacy/monogoly focused legislation. Also, thanks EU for forcing a common sense charging cord standard and killing off the stupid lightning plug. IMO, if apple would have not been so greedy, they could have unlicensed it and maybe everyone would have used that. EAD apple :)
The Mozilla / Brave options are barely that.
You mean “The Mozilla option”. Brave is just Yet Another Chrome Reskin.
Brave is just Yet Another Chrome Reskin
Good point. I don’t use it. I thought it stripped/blocked tracking though.
That’s not the issue. The issue is that it uses the same rendering engine as Chrome, which means any random self-serving shit Google adds gets endorsed by Brave too unless they go out of their way to maintain a fork that removes it.
And using it also strengthens the monopoly of Google over the web.
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I already have been for some time.
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I care immensely
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Maybe, but I’ll keep fighting it tooth and nail with ad blocking and other privacy Security tools. I’ve been much much more receptive to sponsorships from YouTubers I enjoy than traditional ads. I’ll intentionally try stuff just to support the YTber.
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Yes, I already do.
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Primarily, yes it is to be. This is next in line for restrictions upon the internet, it goes in hand with that garbage website and browser attestation shit from Google and chrome. I don’t like any of this direction with ads, it’s gotten worse in everyday life too.
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I can’t draw a comparison in my head.
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I will be loyal to companies that do actually respect my privacy, mullvad being one of them. I recommend them everywhere, and there are others that deserve the same recognition, like Mozilla and many others. I will do my best to not support businesses that do not respect privacy.
mullvad
I had not heard of this one, thanks.
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I already click right back out of websites that don’t make it easy to reject cookies or ask for an email. I certainly won’t be registering anywhere and will find other ways to get the information I need. At this point I am immediately turned off by anything that relies heavily on ad-revenue to exist anyway.
What model is there? It’s pretty much subscriptions, ads, or sales right?
Also, I’m the same way. As stated in previous reply.
That sounds about right to me, maybe throw in government supported and nonprofits
Do you have paid subscriptions to web sites you like?
99% of sites I visit once
I do—I support a handful of creators (including some web content creators) directly via patreon, and donate to the important guys like wiki and craigslist. I don’t support any news organizations and am not sure how they’ll pivot.
Well many have paid subscriptions. I would love to see a total migration to “free with ads” and “micro payments for no ads”. The site would show you your balance owing as you used it. That way you could register to pay but not be getting dinged every month for say a hiking site you only used half the year.
This is great news! I hope this ends the era of subversive psychological targeting that’s given rise to so much of the division in our culture.
Narrator: It didn’t.
Bring back geocities
What type of targetted ads are you thinking of regarding this?
Plenty of evidence regarding social media algorithms and similar, but I’ve never really thought about ads also being used in that way.
I don’t quite understand the leap from “No third party cookies” to “You need to create an account”.
If you’re visiting a site and they drop a cookie, that’s a first party cookie. You don’t need to log in for that to happen, and they can track you all the same. Taking identifiers from a first party cookie and passing them to advertisers will still be a thing, it’ll just require closer coordination between the site and the advertiser than if the advertiser dropped their own cookie.
Now yes, that first party cookie won’t follow you around to other websites and track your behavior there, but creating an account wouldn’t enable this anyway. Besides, Google’s Privacy Sandbox product suite is intended to fill this role in a less granular way (associating k-anonymized ids with advertising topics across websites).
If you use your email address, they can follow you everywhere. Unless you create tons of throw away emails.
posted February 13 2024
“Google recently announced that its dominant Chrome browser will phase out support for third-party cookies by the end of 2023”
“AI Written Human Edited”
We can tell
The secret trick here: nobody will make a new username and password - nor should they. They’ll only log in if they have a convenient login with Google/FB/MS button. Which gives Google premium position in tracking.
Awas OAuth a mistake? Maybe. I agree with your sentiment.
Nothing convenient about those for me. Browser extensions/etc that block tracking cause all of those services to direct me to “are you a robot” and “something looks strange about your login” auth bounces which are getting increasingly difficult to wade through.
A simple username/password, saved in a password manager, is so much easier.
This is great news! But I’m sure Google is probably using it as a way to get all the cookies for themselves and then sell that data to these companies.
The companies will still get their data but they’ll have to buy it from Google only as Google will probably be considered a 1st party cookie vendor.
If any site wants me to sign up to use it, I’ll just not use it. No big deal.
Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
Yes, I already do. I don’t visit Instagram because you need to login to view posts.
What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
I definitely care.
Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
Ah, now this is an interesting question. I can certainly see an argument that ads are necessary to support “free” content, although personally in many cases I prefer to pay a subscription to support content rather than being subjected to ads.
Really though this is kind of a red herring because it’s predisposing that violating your privacy and collecting personal information is a prerequisite to serving ads. It’s required for individually targeted ads, yes, but they don’t need to traget ads to the individual, they could target the ad by site or the contents of the page hosting the ad.
Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
I would not visit any site that sold my details to an advertiser.
Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
Yes, this is very bad.
Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
There’s a reason I don’t use most “social media” sites.
Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from a privacy invasive practices of the past?
Yes, or find a different revenue model that doesn’t invade people’s privacy.
Yes, or find a different revenue model that doesn’t invade people’s privacy
Agreed. The business model is unsustainable, and toxic. As much as I hate paywalls, it’s better than the alternative.
Nobody could seriously believe that the viability of journalism should be dependent on the public’s malleability and willingness to buy McDonalds burgers. And yet that’s the status quo, more or less.
Ah, now this is an interesting question. I can certainly see an argument that ads are necessary to support “free” content
I understand the need for ads, but having lived through popups, bonzi buddy and “punch the monkey”, advertisers blew any chance of me not using an ad-blocker.
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE WON A FREE APPLE IPOD! as it wakes up half the neighborhood.
Ads don’t bother me as much as their invasiveness. I block ads because…
- if a business is dirty enough to resort to interference with popups to get attention, I’m not spending money there. Period.
- I don’t want to support mass surveillance perpetrated by the industry.
Give me simple tech ads on tech sites, grocery ads on store fronts, travel ads on travel articles, etc.
i would be fine with a 5 second brand mention, like “this youtube video is paid for by SoapTM”, quietly. And I’d probably think “thanks.” But it’s like they’re trying to overtake the content. Like you can’t enjoy your show because they’re worried you’re not thinking about their brand for the largest possible % of time.
This is why I wish those micropayment systems took off. I would be happy to pay 20 bucks a month for ‘ad free’ browsing if most of it actually supported the creators of the content i’m accessing.
10x their cpm is still fractions of a cent for me as a user on a per page view basis, there’s space for winning here if one of the big
techad companies gets behind it and pushes.Chromium at least is still looking into it:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/4Rqw4SbjO88/m/j7x8sTyzAAAJ
based on this spec:
Micropayments would scale at a ridiculous rate like microtransactions in games have, so your $20 example would be at least $200 in reality by now.
*presupposing
(Predisposed means you’re more susceptible to something, normally used in medical contexts)
i can’t comprehend how both the advertiser and the platform agree that ruining the content is even good for either the advertiser or the platform.
Ah, now this is an interesting question. I can certainly see an argument that ads are necessary to support “free” content, although personally in many cases I prefer to pay a subscription to support content rather than being subjected to ads.
On the other hand, not everyone can afford a subscription, so offering a both ad-supported and paid-for options is ideal, imo. Well, at least as ideal as it gets in a “grind your hustle or you’ll starve” economy.
Plus all of those subscription transactions have individual costs. 3% just to the credit card companies alone. We either need to actually make low-cost microtransactions an actual thing - no Bitcoin is not that thing - or we need to publicly subsidize artists for the sake of art.
yall have no cheap/free bank transfers? is that some american problem i’m too european to understand?
Yes, exactly.
Yes, having a free ad supported option and a paid ad-free option is best, although I would say only if the ad supported option isn’t using individually targeted ads. You should be able to see the content with ads without needing to login or provide personal data.
I use imginn, nitter and redlib to view Instagram, x and reddit info, respectively. I refuse to engage with any of them using a login or having to turn off my VPN.
I would also like to avoid ads, and pay streaming services rather than cable or anything with ads. Oddly, this hasn’t been the case for any online news sites. The Indy Star is begging and pay walling for subscribers and for some reason, I don’t want to. But I don’t want ads. I admit it’s unreasonable to have neither. They need to pay people like anyone else.
I think it boils down to the difference in how we consume these things. You typically go directly to a streaming service with the intent to browse and consume its content, but few people directly consume news sites. More often you’ll either end up on a particular site from a web search or from a link from an existing content aggregator like facebook, reddit, or lemmy. Since you don’t seek out a particular news platform for regular consumption you feel less inclined to pay an ongoing subscription.
That does raise an interesting idea to me though. What if instead of a normal month to month subscription a news service offered a pre-paid per article account. So, say 25 cents an article say and you can purchase 40 articles for $10, then each article you view deducts from your account. When you get low on remaining articles it can prompt you to top up your account or you can have it auto-renew. Personally I think I’d be far more inclined to something like that because the cost would scale based on how much I actually used the service rather than being an ongoing monthly cost for something I use very sporadically.
This is great problem solving and a creative idea. I would support this concept for sure. I mentioned in another reply how I keep resisting paying a local news agency a subscription, mostly because of what you said. Frequency.
Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
I already generally do.
What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
I honestly don’t much care, but that’s because western civilization is circling the drain, warped and undermined at every turn by wealthy and powerful psychopaths, and it’s just not worth it to care, since there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop them
Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
Some sort of revenue stream is potentially necessary, but that’s the extent of it. Advertising is just one revenue stream, and even if we limit the choices to that, there are still many different ways it could be implemented.
The specific forms of advertising to which we’re subjected on the internet are very much not necessary. And they don’t exist as they do because the costs of serving content require that much revenue - they exist as they do to pay for corporate bloat - ludicrously expensive real estate and facilities and grotesquely inflated salaries for mostly useless executive shitheads.
Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
Again, that’s what I already do, so it would just add more sites to those I won’t visit.
Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
At this point, the two are almost always one and the same. Internet technology is primarily harnessed to the goal of maximizing income for the well-positioned few, and all other considerations are secondary.
Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
This is cynically amusing on Lemmy.
Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?
Of course they should, but they won’t, because they’re psychopaths. They’ll never give up any of their grotesque and destructive privilege, even if that means that they ultimately destroy the host on which they’re parasites.
Someone else that listens to SN!
I am not sure if advertising is a necessary evil. I guess I do not like being sold something constantly, and when I am in the market for anything, I will expose myself to advertising willingly, but it is, in way, a matter of consent. I can imagine that there is also people who like being sold things unsolicited, you know, they might say that they like discovering new products through advertisements.
Personally, while I don’t mind being advertised to when I’m specifically looking for something, marketing materials aren’t particularly useful about informing me whether something will be a good purchase. Marketing is pretty much just a big conflict of interest, where unethical ones will sometimes just outright lie about their product, and even the ethical ones will usually try to avoid talking about the negatives.
Review sites can be ok, but marketers game those, too, so it’s hard to tell if a review is genuine or not (though the ones who aren’t as good at it don’t hide that their descriptions are basically just marketing copy).
Currently, I seek out negative customer reviews. Those can also be gamed, but attention mostly gets put towards the positive ones, so if the negative reviews are mostly about the delivery going badly, stuff that I don’t care about, or very over the top about how horrible the product is, they can often be dismissed.
I think that the market is primed for a store that curates their products and is willing to tell shitty manufacturers to fuck off instead of taking kickbacks or ignoring bad products because they get a cut either way. A store whose goal isn’t to just sell you something but to do everything they can to ensure you won’t buy something you won’t like.
I think technical information has gotten a lot worse for all kinds of product.
Just look up any smartphone how long do you have to scroll and what submenu do you have to click to get very basic specs.
I recently searched for a good air quality sensor. Which WiFi standard does it support? Does it have batteries? What connector does it have? Do I need a shitty app to setup the WiFi information? Does it have a local API? What buttons does it have?
Technical infos are often impossible to find. You have to buy it to try it out and return it when it doesn’t do what you need. Infuriating.
people who like being sold things unsolicited…discovering new products…
That is a good point, I can definitely understand.
I do not like being sold something constantly
I must agree.
A short version rant about advertising: In my opinion, it causes either mental exhaustion or prevents people from reflecting. It’s a constant and invasive distraction, robbing people of peace.
Why? Thinking of all the ways you can’t go ten minutes without seeing ads, unless you’re intentional. They started putting screens in gas pumps! Billboards on the roads, some that are giant LED screens (which I thought should be illegal), ads all over buildings, buses, in the subway, on the bench.
Back to websites: I personally think in their current form, they’re so distracting, they’re unreadable. I refuse to visit websites that require registration, and also leave if I can’t get the simple/reader mode/ on edge/chrome. At least that way, its forced darkmode, and eliminates all the ads, social media links, everything but words. I can deal with some of the pictures not being shown. I wish I could find a browser that only displays websites in that stripped down mode.
Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?
Lots of sites require a free account these days. I don’t visit those sites.
What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?
I care.
Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?
I like advertising - how else are you supposed to find out what products/services are available? Regularly visit every website of every company I might be interested in? That doesn’t work.
It’s data collection I dislike, nothing wrong with ads as long as they’re a reasonably short interruption. Make ads relevant to the content, not the visitor.
Unfortunately under the current system I don’t see ads, because the only way to block tracking is to also block most ads. Sorry, but ad networks have burned that bridge. It’s going to take time to rebuild it.
Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?
A website would need to offer some really valuable service for me to “trade personal details”. Even sites where I have an account (e.g. YouTube) I generally don’t log into that account.
Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?
I think anything that gives users control over wether or not they’re tracked is a good thing - and forcing people to sign up / agree to terms before using a site does that. If websites want my personal details to access them… that’s fine with me. I just won’t use those sites. Other people will make a different decision. It’s how it should be.
I also think I’m not alone, and plenty of major sites will choose to just not do any tracking. I look forward to using those sites.
Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?
I reject that premise. Lemmy is free. I don’t feel like “the product” when I use lemmy. The product is the content and the discussions. If Lemmy has a few ads on every page, I’d be fine with that. I think it’d be a good idea - as long as it’s done right, without invading privacy.
Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?
It’s their business, choose whatever revenue model they want. Just be honest and open about it.
Other people will make a different decision. It’s how it should be
This is an aspect of the predicted changes I can at least appreciate. Choice/consent. There should already have been obtained and informed consent. But instead, they just did it behind people’s backs. I say that because I don’t think most normal/non-tech people really know or care much about cookies and all the ways this stuff actually works.
If Lemmy has a few ads on every page
Ahhh! No please :) …but I understand. Unless these people (hosts) are getting those services paid for by something else, they might need to cover the costs of this like anything else. I really enjoy Lemmy because, at least right now, I feel like it’s in the true spirit of the internet and not a business. It can be for community and discussion like you said. Only reason I’m here. I like asking people why they feel a certain way about things and hopefully walk away with some understanding.
You had to sign up for a free account to post this comment don’t you?
Not with my real name, age, gender, address, phone number or even email.
You can make all those up, no one’s checking. (Yet, but that’s a different topic)
Not me. I maintain my own lemmy server.
You had to jump over the point to post this one
Did I? You signed up for an account where data collection is wide open to everyone.
Which was irrelevant.
The user had commented that they didn’t want to sign up to browse content and then they further clarified that making a comment was worth signing up for sometimes.
But for some reason you are insisting the context doesn’t matter? Either signup is always good or bad, we have to choose?
Overall I’m just tired of hearing how _____ is going to ruin the web, or how evangelical people get about not doing something on principle. Sites that “login-wall” their content aren’t going to succeed, but people refusing to create an account acting all doom and gloom are getting to be insufferable.
people refusing to create an account acting all doom and gloom are getting to be insufferable
I’m not doom and gloom, I think this is a good step in the right direction.
Users should be able to control what websites have access to their data and a sign in process achieves that. Only sign into a site if you are happy with the website’s privacy policy. I have an account on this website because it has in the privacy policy:
We do not sell or disclose user data under any condition, unless required by relevant data protection authorities, any other law enforcement authorities, or if the account owner requests the data themselves.
The thing that offends me the most about tracking across the internet is you are tracked wether you agree to a website’s privacy policy or not. Usually you can’t even read the privacy policy without being tracked.
Users who don’t care about any of that can simply tap this button in Chrome (and Google could easily make it even more seamless if they want to, with a simple “share my stuff with every website I visit” setting):
There are also less invasive versions of that, such as the Passkeys standard, where you just share a unique id web the website - no name or email address. Passkeys are supported in every modern browser and the prompt is pretty similar to the screenshot above, minus the ‘share your name/email/picture’ bit.
Personally, I’m only going to sign into websites that I trust. 99.999% of the internet is run by companies i have never even heard of, so obviously I don’t trust them. And some of the sites I have heard of (e.g. Twitter, Reddit), I definitely don’t trust. But there are a few sites like lemmy.world which I trust and there are also plenty of websites websites that do even less tracking than Lemmy. Including a bunch that are ad supported… because you can show an ad to a visitor without knowing the personal details of that visitor.
As things stand right now, I run a browser extension that stops websites from tracking me and they do that by blocking all ads. I don’t see that as a sustainable option - it means those websites are losing money whenever I visit the website. Far better, far more honest, if I just don’t visit those websites at all. But I need to know what the website’s tracking policy is before i can make that choice, so they need to start asking for permission.
Write your congress person to enact a GDPR-like Bill. Short of that, as you’ve said, idk how sites are going to make money. The current situation is majorly self-inflicted. We don’t want to pay, so they have ads. We don’t want to see ads, so they collect and sell data. Now that VC money has dried up, it’s going to get worse and there’s no other answer.
the user just stated an opinion. you still didn’t explain why the context didn’t matter to you. sounds like you’re one of those people who is annoyed by principals. maybe Lemmy is not for you.
You may be right about the last point. My feed is full of posts from three days ago, talk of cutting off parts of the fediverse that seems to be the antithesis of federation, and other evangelical stances that are abandoned the second consequences come up. It was amusing at first, but it’s starting to seem like a waste of time. Idk.
Big difference between posting a comment and just viewing a website.
The data collection is wide open here, which is my point.
I like advertising
🤮
Now don’t be rude, what ever that person likes can’t be that b…😧…🤢…🤮🤮🤮
Disgusting.
So, internet users may soon need to create accounts on sites they currently access for free. As Laporte worries, “We thought those cookie permission popups were bad, but things may be getting much worse” regarding being forced to hand over personal information just to browse sites.
Good way to kill your site, this is the one thing everyone hates, from the enthusiast to the casual user, making an useless account for 1 service that you barely use.
Slap Google SSO on that and you’re good. Honestly that’s worse than regular registration.
Yeah, if I see a “register an account on this random website” I roll my eyes or close it/back out. If I see “sign in via Google/fb” I recoil with a “fuck no”.
Yeah, I initially was ok with it, but as I have watched these companies I have become less and less ok. I have been contemplating making dummy accounts full of erroneous data so all of the metrics are wrong as a giant middle finger. Sure, I’m a 72-year-old woman in Des Moines, or am I an 80-year-old man in DC? Maybe a 22-year-old in LA? Who knows.
I have a trash google account I made for android emulation and I just use that for those kinds of things.
The only time I check that mailbox is to click verify links.
It’s already fucking bad enough when they popup a newsletter sign up halfway through the article.
I’d pay fifty bucks every time to have the person who made that design decision slapped in the face with a haddock.
If they need permission for third party cookies and those are now no longer possible, the popups can go already.
And if a site doesn’t want to serve people that accept date hoarding, an account with terms and conditions is the only logical way to go.
Belgium forced facebook to not track users without an account and they reacted by doing this exact thing (requiring an account to even read pages). It made it a lot easier for me to not having to deal with Facebook at all. If some store or organization only had the info on Facebook, I’ll just tell them I can’t access it 🤷♂️
Especially considering all the data breaches that you hear about.
On mobile it is pretty common to force the user to create an account before being able to use the app, so people may already be trained on it.
Probably what google is banking on. The world relies so heavily on the internet that if every site required sign in there is very little choice people have besides just not using the internet.
I dabble in marketing for my company. Let me just say advertisers don’t need a damn cookie to know who you are to serve you ads. Even across multiple devices. There are so many methods… literally over a dozen when cross referenced tells companies exactly who you are, even on vpn, even incognito.
Which is why cookies, server-dependent adaptive design and many other things in the Web were big mistakes.
Gemini. Closing FF now.
Cookies don’t even matter for advertising anymore. They don’t need them. You leave breadcrumbs everywhere. Literally where you are, your wifi connection, browser used, browser build, device used, screen size, Google account logged into a browser, just to name a few. They string all this stuff together over days, weeks, years… you’ll slip up at some point no matter how diligent you are with something big, like that Google account login, a share from social media… there’s so much more lol
Well, if you clean all cookies, there’ll be much fewer things targeted in ads. But - yes, still connected.
then why do they still use cookies? i’m genuinely curious.
Google regularly thinks I’m a robot and the ads are not even remotely relevant. There’s no way they know who I am.
If you know who I am and what I like, gimme some damn relevant ads. No, me clicking the “Not interested” button doesn’t mean the next ad is the same damn thing. Worst are those when I search for something for several weeks, and when I finally find it and buy it a week later, I get peppered by the VERY THING for another week.
No offense, of course. The ad industry is just insanity for me.
For those “Just use an ad blocker” - I do, I just occasionally unblock sites to show support.
Some advertisers know their market and pinpoint, others just drag net to see what sticks. You’re getting the equivalent of cold calling for ads. If you show interest in something even once, you’re a target.
Edit: All advertisers are not geniuses. If they’re serving you the same ad for a thing that is not consumable, then one of two things happened. First, their tracking pixel at checkout was not able to associate you with your purchase. Maybe they set it up correctly or there was an error. Maybe you saw the ad on your phone and bought on your computer without enough common data points to connect them both to you. Second, the advertiser may not have set their campaign to stop serving after you converted, which is a total waste of their money. Laugh at them.
