Why does that ad for the car I searched for ONCE show up on all of my devices? It seems to circulate between my old iPhone, Android tablet… even in the new “Edge” browser in the Windows 10 beta on my old notebook!

This happens despite the devices not being connected to a particular service all the time (like Google.)

Philip Smolin, senior vice president for strategy at California-based digital advertising agency Turn is quoted in an article at the MIT Technology Review.

“You really have a convergence of three or four different things that are creating a tremendous amount of change,”

“There may be one wave that is small and it doesn’t move your boat very much, but when you have three or four medium size waves that all converge at the same time, then it becomes a massive wave, and that is happening right now.”

One of these recent waves has been greater sophistication of companies engaged in “probabilistic matching,” the study of millions of Web users to determine who is likely to be the same person across devices. For example,Drawbridge, which specializes in matching users across devices, says it has linked 1.2 billion users across 3.6 billion devices—up from 1.5 billion devices just a year ago.”

Read the full article

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/538731/how-ads-follow-you-from-phone-to-desktop-to-tablet/