Good time of day, humans!
ICYMI, a few weeks ago it was admitted once again:
[NYP] Marketing firm admits using your own phone to listen in on your conversations
It can possibly lead to unexpected results though.
Things humans (and rodents) talk about aren’t always things they want to buy. Also, some keywords are hopelessly overbought.
Here’s a story. In early 2010s I used to have a side hustle troubleshooting websites built using certain then-popular content management system. Because of it, I was visiting lots of small sites, often devoted to quite specific subjects, and kept adblock off most of the time. One day, some guy asked me to take a look at his kayak site; for some reason, instead of giving a link he told me the name of the site. No problem, I looked it up using Google…
Little did I know that for the next three months or so, almost every ad presented to me by Google would be about kayaks one way or another. Thousands of impressions were wasted because of one search query.
Similarly, not everyone saying «crap!» is interested in fertilizer.
When Gmail first came out, I was rather amused by the incompetence of the ads. One in particular, for a DIY (hardware) store mystified me, until I remembered having signed off a message to a friend with "Well, screw that!" ... 🤣🤣
I've had many friends comment on the spookiness the ad content presented to them. When I explain how tech companies, most especially Google, watch everything you do (including what's in your email) in order to curate ads, they are almost invariably unaware of this. They're usually also unaware that there are alternative search engines.
I'm a big fan of ad blockers and tracker blockers. The DuckDuckGo browser is pretty good for this without requiring extensions.
I also make it a point to never ever click on an ad, never ever log into a website using my Google credentials, and minimize any interaction with Google as much as possible.