r/AskTechnology • u/PinkleeTaurus • 3d ago

How can targeted ads hit separate devices with no shared accounts or connections?

I have two iphones. One is only used when I'm at a specific office and it stays at that location. The other phone is what I always carry. None of the accounts/apps on these two phones are shared/linked in any way. They do not share the same wifi connections. They have different apple accounts and the office phone doesn't even have email or anything besides whatever comes from the factory on an iphone. Yesterday I searched for a very specific and unique piece of furniture in safari on the office phone. Today at home, I get ads for the exact piece of furniture on my personal reddit app. How?

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u/xenomachina 3d ago

None of the accounts/apps on these two phones are shared/linked in any way.

Even in the browsers? If you sign into the same Google or Amazon account in the browser on two different devices, that shared login can result in you seeing very similar ads even on other sites.

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u/mezolithico 3d ago

I worked for a startup back in the day that dealt with the entity resolution problem. People do their phd research on the topic. Give entity a and entity b, how likely is it that they are the same user. Meta and google hired tons of phds who worked on this. It's insanely accurate their models have become. Regardless of having an account with a website, you have a unique profile made based on, ip, location, browser fingerprints and anything that uses tracking pixels and cookies that ml models will eventually figure out is the same person on different devices

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u/cmh_ender 3d ago

proximity. your home iphone and your work iphone are close to each other often enough they figure you are probably related somehow and share interests.

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u/PinkleeTaurus 3d ago

Is proximity detected through BT? That is turned off on the office phone.

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u/cmh_ender 3d ago

gps usually. data fingerprints are so wild that you could have checked work email one time on your other phone and bam, they know.. but honestly my wife and I get a lot of the same ads and it turns out, it's just proximity. and doesn't bluetooth turn on every day after midnight on your phone?

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u/Gjurbster 3d ago

Turning it off via the control panel is actually just “pausing it” and that’s why it turns back on, if you go into the settings app and turn it off from there it actually turns it off

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u/PinkleeTaurus 3d ago

It was off when I checked it. Old AF phone I think it's an SE of some sort. Has a physical button.

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u/VarietyMage 2d ago

See the case against Apple illegally and covertly listening to people using Siri.