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The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)
- htrp 4y agoThis is also from nearly a decade ago..... and shows up at least once a year or so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31104803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31104803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26909156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26909156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15658182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15658182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14428792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14428792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14097548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14097548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12842667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12842667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9543534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9543534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8332031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8332031
- marricks 4y agoI’ve seen it most times it’s been up and I will read it every. single. year.
- brianswichkow 4y agoHahaha, thanks for that. ~OP of the article
- lmaocat 4y ago2015 is nearly a decade ago...great now I'm getting an existential crisis
- danuker 4y agoMemento mori. Steer towards how you want to be living, while you can.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoGreetings fellow future-dweller! Here are some facts to get you oriented: * We're shooting down UFOs on a weekly basis * The entire world was recently shut down because of a virus * The machines are becoming creepily human-like * You probably can't afford eggs anymore
- alias_neo 4y agoI thought this was a joke, until I got about half way down that list.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoI just created a calendar event to remind me to post it in 2024.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoAlright, I think we're due for time travellers and lizardmen, the abyssal sleeper is about to awaken, and Galactus may pop by. Let us know how it checks out.
- cleanchit 4y agoIt was nearly 5 years ago too.
- m000 4y agoThe question is: would this still work today?
- bombcar 4y agoI suspect something akin to it might work, but there would be "collateral damage" in that you can't target as precise anymore, not after all the kerfuffle around Facebook ads and Apple and such. But if you don't mind others seeing your targeted ad, you probably could still hit your target.
- 762236 4y agoHow do I target my daughter on TikTok?
- freefruit 4y agoTiktok targeting is not very good, best bet would be finding out what hashtag to target.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andrewinardeer 4y agoIf day == Tuesday, print "Please put out the bins" If day == Saturday, print "Be home by 9pm"
- oh_sigh 4y agoProbably easier just to decompile tiktok and insert some code which checks for a video at a certain known location controlled by you and plays it if it is present. And then surreptitiously install that app on her phone.
- lozenge 4y agoSimply make an entertaining video, top it off with "and if you're my daughter, stop scrolling and empty the dishwasher" and wait.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- prhrb 4y agoThat's very scary
- pcardoso 4y agoI wonder how much of this is still possible. I have been trying to define an audience (ie, people who work at surfing schools), without much success.
- petercooper 4y agoI recall FB became quite keen on not letting you target particularly small audience groups which would have made it even harder. However, a friend of mine recently got an ad targeting his name with some custom clothing and was confused how it happened because Facebook doesn't let you target by name. My speculation (and I'm intrigued if anyone thinks this is possible) is because his email address is $fname@$fname$lname.com, an advertiser autogenerated a giant list of common first names and my friend's last name plus common email providers or domain name patterns, fed it into FB's Audience Manager, and then targeted all the ones that matched FB logins. A sort of dictionary attack, if you will.
- fsckboy 4y agoI don't know how the Facebook end of the targeting worked, but having your friend's name and email address on any number of probably-even-freely-available lists seems highly probable, no need to autogenerate them
- jvanderbot 4y agoMore likely FB is trialling a way to put $name in an ad?
- petercooper 4y agoIt had a photo showing the clothing with the name on, but maybe, though it didn't smell that way to me.
- dalys 4y agoI think your guess would be the most likely. Step 1. Get a huge email list Step 2. Grep that email list for peter Step 3. Do a custom audience in FB and run a Peter t-shirt campaign I don't know any other way to do anything "dynamic" in Facebook Ads. And FB doesn't really like that advertisers creep out their audience, even though they can. I assume it's the reason behind their policy that you can't call out personal attributes. E.g. you can't say "Hey hetereosexual white person! Click here", but you have to write it as "Here's a fun website for hetereosexual white people". I just double checked the policies and using a first name in the ad is actually not allowed, BUT I think you can get around that by having a general ad like "Cool name t-shirts" and then the image happens to have "Peter" printed on the t-shirt. Source: https://transparency.fb.com/policies/ad-standards/objectionable-content/personal-attributes https://transparency.fb.com/policies/ad-standards/objectiona...
- freitzkriesler2 4y agoWhat creepy albeit hilarious fun. Partly the reason I block ads is because of ad targeting. It gets way too creepy. Unrelated, back in the 90s and early 00s, I used to troll people in my grade by signing up their email addresses for porn. Since most people had emails their parents monitored, this would inevitably lead to awkward questions. I also would script kiddy people with aik bots that would boot them offline. The magic of computes with limited resources.
- stuaxo 4y agoAnd here was it used for in seriousness https://inews.co.uk/news/labour-staff-deceived-corbyn-facebook-176703 https://inews.co.uk/news/labour-staff-deceived-corbyn-facebo... Staff of the UKLabour party deceived the leader at the time by making very targetted facebook ads, so it would look to him like they were doing what the campaign as they were meant to be, while they were actually trying to undermine him.
- 9dev 4y agoSounds like a guaranteed career-ending move that’s bound to become public sooner or later…
- lozenge 4y agoConsidering the stakes were "who's going to be the next Prime Minister" and they worked at a political party, they must have thought this was more important than their career.
- _benedict 4y agoOr that their career was better served by undermining those within the party that were less aligned with them, to open up more posts in future for themselves and ensure positions of authority were staffed with those most likely to retain their services.
- Super_Jambo 4y agoHah but then the right wing of the party took over because of the lefts poor electoral performance...
- jvalencia 4y agoReading the comments, it is worth noting that to target someone directly, you just need them to visit a site with a re-targeting pixel. They load an ad 1x1 pixel image that lets google set a cookie to re-target that user when they are shown google ads: https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/resources/retargeting-ads/ https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/resources/retargeting... Replace Google with your ad provider.
- btbuildem 4y agoHold on, I thought it was not possible to target ads to specific individuals... can one do that now??
- MacsHeadroom 4y agoI'm fairly certain Facebook at least will not deploy a pixel campaign until the pixel has collected a few hundred visitors. However, you can trigger a pixel any number of times with a headless chrome session using a proxy list. Script up a few hundred triggers and you'll be able to target single individuals to you heart's content.
- saul_goodman 4y ago"Always has been"
- PeterisP 4y agoYou target an ad campaign to IDs representing 100 users, 1 of which is your target and 99 don't really exist or are bots.
- yesenadam 4y agoThe main takeaway for me was that dark red writing on dark grey is absolutely unreadable! I tried but couldn't make out the red words at all.
- mihaaly 4y agoMine was that you need an Excel to create a CSV file. For one email. Why?
- gpvos 4y agoUse the tools you're familiar with?
- ploum 4y agoI was also confused by this. It’s literally writing the email in a text editor. But this probably means that the poster has no knowledge of what the CSV format is. (which is sad to see that we created a system in which someone intelligent and tech-savy enough to pull out such a prank has no curiosity/background culture about very basic things in computers. Not to blame him, blaming the culture and the education)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gpvos 4y agoEven though it's simple, it's a minor detail. I am unaware of many minor details in lots of things I use. It's not that I can't be bothered or I'm not curious, it just that it has never come up and there's lots more important stuff.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoThat's why you don't have FB ads. It's so easy to kill them. Btw, I never understood why people get a hard on when pranking someone.
- prepend 4y agoI enjoy pranking and being pranked. For me, the enjoyment comes from secret knowledge of the true world vs the perceived world and then the quick feeling of reconciliation of my memory rewriting itself to use the new information of what actually happened vs what I thought happened. I’ve never received a hard on, but it is mentally enjoyable. I’d say within reason though as a prank stops being funny when there’s some actual change made to reality instead of just perception. It’s not a good prank if someone sells their car because of it, or does something they regret after the prank is revealed.
- backtoyoujim 4y agoWhen I was first asked to some facebook ads for a company that I was actually doing industrial sewing work in a production environment ... I saw how targeted everything could be with the ads and it just seemed so gross. That was 2009-ish. And I haven't had a facebook account for me to edit since then. I'm glad some people saw levity, but to me it just seemed dour.
- justusthane 4y agoHilarious, although I am a bit disappointed. I was expecting an extremely specific demographic filter to target his roommate (e.g. “white males in their mid twenties who live in Philadelphia and like Slipknot and Beanie Babies”). I didn’t realize you could target based on email addresses!
- manmal 4y agoThat explains the highly targeted Amazon ads I was often getting on Facebook.
- tracker1 4y agoReally creepy is seeing, "Your friend X bought this." on Amazon, regarding a friend on Facebook... can only imagine if it was something embarrassing.
- happymellon 4y agoIt makes sense that you can directly advertise to your mailing list.
- bilekas 4y agoThia is the first time I've read this but so damn good! I'm going to NEED to read this again for a giggle in the future!!
- ifdefdebug 4y agoOk, so here I go... No, this was NOT "very well played", because the pranker, when he was confronted by the pranked, resorted to a flat-out lie: "but it’s not me", basically shutting down the only avenue leading to truth, short of accusing a roommate and friend of being a liar. AFAIAC, that lie transformed the prank into deception. He should be happy the roommate took it so easy. Also why do we see two different versions of the final ad?
- paulluuk 4y agoIt was a pretty awesome (and creepy) prank, but I do agree that once he was accused, he should have come clean.
- slingnow 4y agoEarly in the story, he mentions the roommate had already played an elaborate deceptive prank on the author, so I don't see an issue with doing what he did. The roommate had already established the precedent that deception was fair game.
- IYasha 4y agoThere's some contradiction in this story: being "extremely smart" and using facebook. Without adblock. )
- mandmandam 4y agoYou can be extremely smart at 99 things, and undone by one.
- fratur79 4y ago[dead]
- counterpartyrsk 4y agoGenius roommate, yet doesn't run ad-blocker?