This is really creepy
This is really fucking creepy. I just went to my Vox homepage, and the ad on the right of the screen caught my eye.
Simply Fountains? Have you ever heard of them before? Have you ever seen an ad from them? I haven't. And I'd never heard of them at all, until I ordered a christmas present for my mother from them last week.
OK, so they know where I've been shopping. That's OK. What's not OK? The fountain in the ad is EXACTLY the present I sent to mom. Could this possibly be a coincidence? It seems unlikely.
That is CREEPY! Creepy like the failed Facebook thing, but worse because it's less obvious. Facebook got shot down pretty quickly, but this is quieter and more subtle.
I think the time has come for me to disable all the ads from Vox.
Simply Fountains? Have you ever heard of them before? Have you ever seen an ad from them? I haven't. And I'd never heard of them at all, until I ordered a christmas present for my mother from them last week.
OK, so they know where I've been shopping. That's OK. What's not OK? The fountain in the ad is EXACTLY the present I sent to mom. Could this possibly be a coincidence? It seems unlikely.
That is CREEPY! Creepy like the failed Facebook thing, but worse because it's less obvious. Facebook got shot down pretty quickly, but this is quieter and more subtle.
I think the time has come for me to disable all the ads from Vox.
Comments
This is CREEPY! (and purely coincidental)
I can guarantee that Vox (Six Apart) has no sense of any transactional behavior that you have on 3rd party properties. We don't store that data, nor do we have plans of that building that level of targeting.
When going to the Simply Fountains website it does look they they are featuring that fountain (and discounting it)
David (works at Six Apart)
In looking at an HTTP trace of the homepage, I see calls to sixapart.adbureau.net, media.adrevolver.com, ad.doubleclick.net, and something that's probably a tracking pixel.
We checked with one our ad vendors and have checked in with the first one. Here is what they said:
We have no way of singling out an individual. Should this person be a part of a behavioral segment, and the sites they are visiting happen to be part of our network, then we can serve them a relevant ad. However, the below advertiser i (Simply Fountains) is not our client.
Additionally, here is a link you can use to set some more privacy preferences:
http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
I'll let you know if I find out more from our other vendor.
David
Hi Patty - this must have been a coincedence unless it was picked up contextually from the page. Our other vendor doesn't target behaviorally, they target contextually from the content on the page.