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…
It does digest what’s being said in the video and compare it to the other videos you watch. To better personalize your experience.
It’s definitely personalized, even though I had turned all of that off, since tubular interacts with YouTube without logging in.