this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Today I was watching a few YouTube videos about groundwork with horses. First time I did that. Yes, I was logged in.

Later today, I hopped on Amazon to track one of my packages. And in my suggestions, there were horse grooming kits, halters and the like, even though I had never before looked for things like these on there.

My mail addresses are different on the two places, and so are, of course, my passwords. I am on Linux with Firefox, uBlock etc. So this must be an incredible coincidence, a miracle, mind-reading, or maybe witchcraft?

I wonder what I could tweak to make things like this happen less in future. I am thinking of adding a Pi-hole to my router, yet I am no longer so sure, if it would help?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (4 children)

As much as people like to delve into conspiratorial gossiping, making swooping statements about how Google and Amazon work together, there's often much simpler and more reasonable explanations.

For one, you are one of billions of people browsing both these sites today, it's bound to happen to some of you.

But what prompted you to look up the horses stuff? Sometimes it's an article, a social media post (reddit and Lemmy count), a radio segment, etc. That often leads a group of people to look up the same stuff en-masse.

Its also possible that you've visited other sites about horses that have put you in that cohort, where manufacturers have placed their own tracking pixels whose info they can supply to Amazon for targeting.

The reason why a Google / Amazon collaboration seems so unlikely is that they are competing. Not just at large, but in this specific case. Those recommendations you see on Amazon are ads too. People pay for them, and use specific targeting rules to find people to click on them. This is what both Amazon and Google sell, access to specific eyeballs (eg. males in their late 30's who have once shown interest in motorsports). This is their secret sauce. They'd be crazy to allow that information to flow to a competitor with their own ad platform.

I know this goes against the grain here, so feel free to downvote, but keep in mind that conjecture and wildly inaccurate gossip about what these giant companies do often muddies the waters and makes it much harder to attack them on the shady and downright evil stuff that they do do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

what prompted you to look up the horses stuff?

Nothing really. I am more interested in dogs, but wanted to know how other animals are trained and possibly learn something new from their techniques.

I could try Firefox's sandboxing, maybe.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Were you horsing around? Hahahaha

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