Ok, so. Earlier today I was watching the Technology Connections video about how Power is energy over time. In the video he shows a picture of an Anker Solix powerbank to illustrate the concept of energy storage. I’ve never seen or heard of this product before.
An hour later I’m reading an article on Lemmy, and there is an ad for that same powerbank.
What explains this? Some explanations I can think of:
- Random chance.
- Google scans YouTube videos for information about what products appear in them, and knows that I watched the video, and that I’m the same person now reading the article. It then gives this information to everyone in the ad-selling marketplace, so the Anker ad company can bid high to show me an ad.
- Google is observing what appears on my screen in order to sell this info to advertisers.
I think 2 is most likely given Occam’s Razor, but I didn’t think Google scanned yt videos like this.
Is there something I’m missing?
I was watching on an Android phone, on Tubular. My browser is IronFox. I’m surprised that Google can follow my activity from one app to the other… this is probably based on IP address, but I wonder what other device fingerprinting tubular and IronFox expose…
My guess is it’s coincidence and that the powerbank company has just paid for a lot of ad space recently for similar topics. See if you can confidently reproduce it a few times. If so, I’ll change my opinion.
I’m only saying this because I have never once had this happen. However my mobile browser clears history every time on close. Does yours? I personally disabled “Android System Intelligence” as that’s responsible for a lot of app personalization on Android phones.
Could also be that you have some sorta BS toggle turned on on your Android phone where it personalizes ads. You may want to check.