Alright my laptop has a VPN continuously enabled.
Last weekend, I visited family out-of-state, and two of the things we watched (on their smart TV) appeared as YouTube ads on my laptop today, now that we’re a few hundred miles away.
Coincidence or what…?
Your devices talk to other devices and leak many identifiers all the time
Advertisers know that you were present while something was play on TV thousands of miles away from where you live
There are everything from browser fingerprinting to 1x1 pixel tracking. Is not a coincidence. Is remarketing.
That’s what I thought. It’s impressive (and slightly terrifying)
Were you walking around with a phone that has a Google account?
These things happen everywhere all the time and people are still surprised. And there is no official acknowledgement from Google or anyone involved that they collect this kind of data. Right?
If there is, it’s buried in 10,000 lines of fine print that I sure as hell didn’t read
The naive explanation maybe whatever you saw is the most popular or high-frequency promotions right now, targeting people from your social profile 🤷
It's unlikely but still a remote possibility
Unlikely since the first time I’ve
watched Family Feud in ten years was last weekend, and I got an ad about Steve Harvey today 😂
Ah okay.
May I offer another possibility - maybe if you'd seen a Steve Harvey as before this you would've not thought twice about it but now you're primed to notice it more.
Saying this, only from last experiences where, whenever I learn a new complicated word/phrase, after that I'd see them everywhere (even newspapers/ random articles) for the next week or so.
Human psyche is as powerful if not more, than big tech
