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Which is an extremely trivial check to add - if you got assigned that ticket, you'd probably point it at like 2 or so hours.

However, they've been like this for over a decade so it's likely there intentionally. here's one way that could be possible:

There could be some popular third party service that's integrated on many e-commerce sites that sells this information and doesn't actually give a damn if you bought the refrigerator or not. They're selling you, not the refrigerator.

That's the problem with data brokers, it's mostly low quality data.



> Which is an extremely trivial check to add - if you got assigned that ticket, you'd probably point it at like 2 or so hours.

Yep, totally a 2hr task for an engineer who works on homedepot.com to “check” that you bought a fridge from lowes.com after you first price shopped the other site. Also a two hour task for a Google engineer to know you bought one in person at Best Buy after researching online first.

Yes, there are basic cases (buying from same merchant as who’s suggesting) that should be handled, but let’s not foolishly pretend that’s the average case, let alone majority / all.


Amazon consistently shows me ads for products I bought on Amazon. Don't bother talking about edge cases when the simple case doesn't work at all.


I haven't worked at Amazon in this vertical so if people know definitively feel free to correct.

The Amazon case could be the same problem I discussed before. Third party sellers can pay fees to promote/boost their listings on Amazon so ultimately the same incentive structure holds if there's fees for impressions and not just sales.


We're talking the basic case. I visit website X, look at item Y, purchase item Y, then get advertising for item Y for the next Z days.

You can throw your hands up and yell impossible by looking for outliers with just about anything


> You can throw your hands up and yell impossible by looking for outliers with just about anything

Show me where I did that?


not to mention cross-device browsing




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