Your last words...

Tell my bikes I love them.
 
I regret nothing, wanted for little, and lived a life well lived, love y'all, peace out.
 
It ain't random...

The first time I noticed this phenomenon was several years ago 'sitting around the office talking with a co worker about tires.
Motorcycle tires.
Shortly afterwards I take my phone from my pocket and open up FB.
My "feed" is full of ads for guess what...

There's many reasons for this phenomena, but it's not because your phone is listening to you.

Something as little as being on the same celltower or wifi with someone else in that group who went and googled motorcycle tires while they were in the shitter 20 minutes later is enough to bring it up on all of the "connect the dots" devices from everyone else in the group. If you have GPS location turned on on your social media apps, a lot of them snoop this information and hoover it back to the mothership, so when you and a few buddies are having beers in the garage, all with GPS permissions enabled for various social media (FB is the worst), and then two of them go home and furiously google motorcycle tires, yeah, you'll get endless motorcycle tire ads. Or whatever someone else searched for.

This is why it's a good idea to have GPS/location permissions turned off for ANY app that doesn't absolutely need it, thigs like Facebook especially. Disable bluetooth as well as there are nefarious methods to abuse that too, and things like social media apps certainly don't need them.

A few years ago my wife had a girls pool party and there was 10-15 women in the backyard. At one point they got talking about bras somehow, a few obviously googled it, and blam, for weeks afterwards I got endless bra ads on Facebook and Google.

There's also the Baader-Meinhof effect. Your phone may have been showing you ads for motorcycle tires all along, you were just zoning them out until they were top of mind all of a sudden, but suddenly you started actually focusing on them after talking about them.

But it's usually the wifi/celltower/
 
It's pretty invasive.

My buddy and I went to a Honda dealership one day to look at CRF450Ls.

He has location services turned on, so no surprise when he started getting Honda ads after the visit. But why were the ads about CRF450Ls, of all Honda models to show him?!?!

Facebook is creepy.

Indeed.

Bluetooth beacons is another method that a lot of these sorts of things spread through, but a lot of people aren't even aware that they're a thing. Just walking into a store in a mall that is using them can result in all your ads changing for the next few days as you have been "attached" as having visited that retailer, and now that retailer is sending you ads trying to get you to come back and buy more. That might have been what triggered your Honda experience.

There's an insane level of things a lot of apps do to accomplish things like this. It's half very interesting reading, and half disturbing reading to see exactly how much social media and apps like TikTok learns about you, how they do it, and how it's leveraged.

Coles notes version: To go the settings for all your social media apps and disable location awareness/GPS as well as Bluetooth. Set your Wifi to use rotating MAC addresses when on public wifi, and enable every privacy related feature you can find. It won't eliminate the problem, but it sure makes it drastically harder for you to become one of Zuckerburgs (or Bezos's, etc etc etc) products.
 
Gang of fifty somethings partying around a pool . No offence but we don’t need photos .


Sent from my iPhone using GTAMotorcycle.com
 
Indeed.

Bluetooth beacons is another method that a lot of these sorts of things spread through, but a lot of people aren't even aware that they're a thing. Just walking into a store in a mall that is using them can result in all your ads changing for the next few days as you have been "attached" as having visited that retailer, and now that retailer is sending you ads trying to get you to come back and buy more. That might have been what triggered your Honda experience.

There's an insane level of things a lot of apps do to accomplish things like this. It's half very interesting reading, and half disturbing reading to see exactly how much social media and apps like TikTok learns about you, how they do it, and how it's leveraged.

Coles notes version: To go the settings for all your social media apps and disable location awareness/GPS as well as Bluetooth. Set your Wifi to use rotating MAC addresses when on public wifi, and enable every privacy related feature you can find. It won't eliminate the problem, but it sure makes it drastically harder for you to become one of Zuckerburgs (or Bezos's, etc etc etc) products.
Marketing guru Terry O'riley does a radio program on marketing called Under the Influence.

Somebody figured out what products are typically purchased by soon to be Mom's. After seeing these purchases being made the company would send out adverts specifically for pregnant women.
When one father found his daughter receiving these ads he lost it on the company. "How dare you imply my precious....."
Yup. Turns out she was preggers.
 
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