What’s the deal with Ad’s

Have you ever seen an ad on your social media site that is promoting something you recently viewed on Amazon? Crazy, right? How do they know that you looked up fuzzy socks, with pink pigs on them, on Amazon? It is annoying enough to have your feed filled with advertisements period, let alone things you want to buy but didn’t. That’s a little weird don’t you think.

The mystery behind all this is that advertising companies and plat forms gather our information and share it with one another to provide more relevant ads for users like you and me. They gather their data from your user id, IP addresses, browser information, local web storage, etc.

This means Amazon knows all of your history almost everywhere! Amazon sets an Amazon owned cookie in your browser every time you visit their site. Then as you surf the web other sites like Facebook has permission to access the Amazon cookie as a third party. Then Facebook can use that information to create ads specifically targeted to you.