Vikas Agarwal, an expert in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Cloud Computing, writes a special column for Deccan Mirror about decoding the automatic ads on a phone.
You were walking on a street in search of buying a mobile phone when suddenly you saw Google ads about online mobile stores appearing on your Android ads. You went to a clothing store and tried some good-looking dresses. You suddenly get ads on your phone relating to clothes available online.
Shocking and surprising!! Isn’t it? You might be really startled by the sudden display of these ads on your mobile even before you search for it. You might wonder about the mystery that’s behind these relevant things that are exactly able to display what’s on your mind. One might feel it as a programming wonder and genius of the software. And the story ends there.
It isn’t something we can’t understand, and neither is quantum theory. It’s just another simple trick used by Google that helps track your activity. Though we don’t use the phone every second. The phone in your pocket becomes your invisible organ in your body. It is programmed constantly to track your every activity, from your movement, the places you visit, and you recently visited, to your work patterns, and, most importantly, your internet cookies, which have been stored in your search history for a long time.
The search engine creates an algorithm that uses multiple methods to track your interests, your lifestyle, your favorite cuisine, language, movies you often watch, genres, your visits, Google Maps timeline, favorite places, and things you have searched, and sites you often visit and which time.
Multiple methods like cookies, tracking pixels (invisible images embedded in webpages or mails to track user activity), cross-device tracking, ad networks, and behavioral targeting come under the same umbrella of tracking. Though it looks scary, the primary purpose of these trackers is just to find out parameters to simplify your ad viewing experience and display the relevant ads on your device. And so, whenever you see something on your mind and an ad relevant to it, understand it appeared because you told the system already. It’s as simple as that.