As others have pointed out, it's an advertising technique called retargeting. Here are some of the technical details of how exactly it is done(Facebook's implementation might differ somewhat from this, but overall concept is same)
/*
DSP - Demand side partner (Entity which works with someone who wants to show their ads)
SSP - Supply side partner (Entity which works with some who have potential space on web to show ads)
/
1. When you visited Amazon.com, one of the DSP associated with them drop a cookie on your system to uniquely identify you as a user. Let's call it cookiexyz.
2. When you end up on Facebook.com, their SSP also drops a cookie on you, let's call it cookieabc.
3. Now only thing remaining is to determine cookiexyz and cookieabc are same users.
4. To do that, SSP requests a bid from Amazon's DSP(among others). While doing that, it calls one of the DSP's url(bid tag) which sends cookiexyz in request headers and sends cookieabc in query params. This uniquely profiles the user which DSP stores in their system and next time user requests a bid again, they can serve them ads based on preferences based on cookiexyz. In other words, info that your looked at some shoes on Amazon.com
/ disclaimer: I work as a dev in one of the Advertising partner for Yahoo and Bing. */
Thing is, OP mentions using two different browsers, which is why it's surprising.
I guess there's still the possibility that a cookie was added months before that and that "tainted" browsing was forgotten. But it's still worth wondering if some other identification mechanism could be at play.
I'm sure they are tracking/matching by cookies, ip, FB logins, geolocation, etc . . . by combining those it's pretty easy to serve up the right ad, most of the time.
It's weirder that that. I was notified via a Facebook ad that my Navionics subscription to charts from Asia expired. I only use Navionics as an ios App.
That's not weird. Navionics presumably had your email address. They then likely uploaded that as part of a list of customers into what FB calls a "Custom Audience List" and promoted some post to that audience.
Any xkcd fans here?
I made a progressive web app for xkcd, with all the usual features of a pwa(offline loading, installable etc.)
I made this to learn about service workers and performance optimisations, so comments and feedback are welcome.
I want to be more socially active in 2017. I graduated in 2013 , got a dev job and since then been living in a virtual world w/o any interaction whatsoever with people outside of professional environment.
In 2017, I want to break this trance, get to know the real world and probably get a girlfriend. :)
One of the better ways to do this is to to take the lead. Be a leader, not a follower. That can be interpreted multiple ways: organizing events, inviting people to things, asking what you would like, not what you "want", even taking dance lessons (something like Salsa), not caring about the outcome so much...
Some wisdom from a book from the Ask HN Books thread [1]
> - choose carefully what you give a f*ck about, but when you do, do it right
> - there will always be problems, deal with them and move on, it's your own responsibility.
> - the constant pursuit of a positive experience is in itself a negative experience, acceptance of a negative experience is a positive experience
No need to be a leader. Just to be comfortable with yourself, being able to enjoy things that can be enjoyed socially is enough to attract other people. Salsa lessons are good advice. Also a wine tasting course! There you can follow others and be happy too.
I spend thousands of hours learning Japanese. If you not live in Japan, it is a totally waste of time. My wife is from Japan, why I learned the language. But because of still living in Germany, I regret learning it. I could learn so many other things.
