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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/

(not a rickroll, I promise)

A couple of people have been asking about how the whole ~stealing elections~ thing works in the context of this scam and I'm probably going to have to write a follow up working through that, but where I'm at is pretty much that Cambridge Analytica, etc, are very much in the category of their product is making people think they *could* and that the "microtargeting" was wildly, wildly overstated.

@stavvers

there exists a real memory hole in the states about the G. W. Bush years, but there was a hilarious narrative that the Bush's chief campaign advisor Karl Rove was some kind of brain genius that could perceive these invisible demographic segments and zero in on them with direct mailing and phone calls.

and this was credulously accepted by *everyone*. after an election where that candidate quite famously got fewer votes and was essentially appointed to the presidency by the court.

@jackdaw_ruiz this entirely passed me by but completely fits the pattern of Evil Supervillain Genius and I bet he got a lot of grift work off the back of it