this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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Absolutely. I’ve tested this with friends, and we pick random topics or products we would never need or look up. Sure enough, we both start getting ads within 24 hours.
Got into a rare mild argument with my wife last week, and we started getting marriage counseling and dating app ads. Fucking infuriating.
Notice the plausible deniability that’s always put into ‘we are not spying on you statements.’ Zuckerberg will tell Congress, ‘Facebook is not listening on your phone,’ but that leaves it open for a third party partner to be doing the spying for them.
If you can reproduce it that reliably, I would be interested in hearing the results of an experiment where you have a clean phone and install just one of your apps at a time to see exactly which apps are spying on you. We all have our suspicions about which are definitely doing this, but it's hard to know for sure without a proper controlled test.
How can you be sure that the "random" products aren't something that you've seen ads on (but not remembered seeing), which stuck in your subconscious, and then you regurgitated as the random item? Then later when you saw more of the same ads, you noticed them and they seemed like new, targeted ads.
You would need to use a random topic generator, not just come up with them via brain.