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Facebook knows I live in London, and has known this fact for more than a decade. It just loves to serve me ads for businesses in Birmingham, where it knows I don't live.

Google and the brand I bought it from know that I own a specific type of mattress. They know this because I googled it and came into the website and bought it. And yet, I get advertised that specific mattress, from that specific supplier.

This is going to be one of those threads that I wish Mastodon had a "turn off replies" features, so anyway before replying, please thoroughly read this and also know that I work in marketing so I have a decent grasp on how advertising works, which is how I can confidently say the entire thing is a fucking scam run by the stupidest people in the world. https://anotherangrywoman.com/2023/01/18/how-to-give-advice-on-the-internet-without-being-an-utter-menace/

I ended up blogging about this in much more detail because I think it's important we talk about this https://anotherangrywoman.com/2023/07/05/scams-upon-scams-the-data-driven-advertising-grift/

@stavvers That's very good. I also get this. I travel a lot for my job, and for 6 months after I have been somewhere, I get ads offering accommodation and food recommendations for the place I have already visited.

Also, have you read any of Cory Doctorow's (@pluralistic) work on this? He has been hammering on about how terrible internet ads are for ages.

https://doctorow.medium.com/killing-online-surveillance-with-contextual-ads-7478c4536ea1

@stavvers @pluralistic Doctorow is depressingly prolific (I thought I wrote a lot, but he puts me to shame) and has written extensively about internet advertising, tech, and more, and coined the term "enshittification" to describe the process by which tech platforms start by trying to be useful products, and end up ruining themselves by trying to extract as much income from users on both sides of the platform