Hey! I heard you were talking about me?

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 Hey everyone!

I hope your weekends have been going well so far!

I've been thinking a lot about this week's topic and decided to settle on how some social media apps will advertise themselves on others.

I have to say I came up with this idea when I was on TikTok and started to conveniently get Lemon8 advertisements after we had been talking about it for our social media presentation. I've seen this happen with Facebook, TikTok, and several other sites I can't remember off the top of my head when I've been on Pinterest. I thought this to be a bit weird at first, especially when seeing ads pop up on YouTube, but soon began to compare it to those that you would see if watching the nightly news. It's essentially the same thing, just in a slightly different method. However, the part that still slightly freaks me out is the fact that I have been talking about numerous topics or items at some points (in conversation whether in real life or in person) and have gotten ads for those exact things. Sometimes these are things I've never searched or have ever fit into the type of demographic I am. I also noticed that I started receiving ads in Spanish as soon as I started to take Spanish classes through Duolingo. When looking to see if our phones "listen" to us i got conflicting articles, but considering the poor run major social media outlets such as Facebook and Google have for being found to steal our data, I don't think that that theory is truly far from the truth. 

Comments

  1. Anna V.October 1, 2023 at 6:24 PM

    Phew! This is one I have been mulling over for a while. I've noticed ads for items I've searched for, which makes sense. Most of the other ads are for things that friends like, or as you've brought up, related to demographics. I've also seen the ads for things that I have mentioned in conversations. Those make me wonder a bit, too. I've looked at a few language classes through Duolingo, and searched for things in Swedish. I haven't seen ads in any of those languages, at least not yet. I'll have to pay closer attention, I'm curious now!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ellen DooleyOctober 2, 2023 at 1:41 PM

    Oops -forgot that I am supposed to be using Duolingo to learn Spanish! In part because of that, limited Facebook use, and the fact that I have not tried to get back onto Instagram since I was locked out while trying to temporarily suspend by account (THAT and similar stories of others' is a whole other tangent that we might want to explore), keeps me out of that aspect of the social media advertising world. I am curious now, too, and it will incentise me to return to Duolingo. How ironic to be pursuing ads...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Samantha MatherneOctober 2, 2023 at 2:06 PM

    Not long after I switched to an android phone, I turned Bixby off so my phone would stop listening to me. I did not like that invasion of privacy. I'm still being watched, though! Because I use Google products so much, I can do a Google search for a thing and then get advertisements for it in a different product/website due to the cookies Google has collected on me. I search on Google, log into TikTok and Pinterest with my Google account, and get advertisements for that item on those platforms. Amazon watches me, too! I have so many books on my to-read list on (Amazon-owned) Goodreads, and then Amazon recommends some of those titles to me for purchase on their own app. It's scary. My husband once got an ad for bras on HIS Facebook after we talked about me buying some. His iPhone was listening...

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