Is it dumb to think my phone picks up words in my coversation

[Yamles]

So over the past two weeks or so I've noticed that I will be having a coversation about something, and within 24 hours I will see as advertisement for it on social media somewhere (mostly Instagram or Facebook). Some examples are:

- we stopped outside a childcare centre on the way home from visiting friends to have a coffee and Phil asked if I'd heard of the centre before, and said the name. Then later that afternoon I got an ad for it on Instagram

- we are buying/selling at the moment and I was complaining to a friend about the real estate agent I had talked to about something. Later that evening he was in my 'people you may know' list on Facebook.

- in the same coversation, my friend had asked me if we were using Remax (real estate company) and I said no, later on that day I had an ad for remax on Instagram.

Before this I had noticed the usual ads for makeup products and baby stuff which is what I've been getting for years, but I feel like since my last iOS update it's pretty specific.

Am I being tin foil hat level crazy for thinking that they've changed the way they harvest data?

[Phil Williamson]

probably the Baader-Meinhof effect

[Bobby Swisha]

No my iPhone has done that shit

[Bobby Swisha]

Sometimes it’s something SO obscure there’s no way it just guessed

[Bobby Swisha]

I think the last time it happened I was talking to my dad or somebody about what some other language is like (which I’ve never even thought of before then), I went upstairs and looked at my phone and had an ad for some program to learn that language

[Bobby Swisha]

Another time I was talking to a girl who told me she’s about to go to school in Lubbock TX (5 hours away) for physical therapy and got an ad for a physical therapy program in located in Lubbock that same day.

[Dungeon Snake]

ive never had this happen but i can definitely confirm that facebook reads my messenger conversations and advertises stuff to me based on things i mention. i'm pretty sure it advertises stuff to me based on things that my girlfriend and friends are interested in too, that we've never even discussed.

[Phil Williamson]

I mean some of these are pretty crazy coincidences but like...what else could it be? apparently this is a conspiracy theory that's always popping up but I just can't see it. like I gotta imagine the PR hit if it leaked that they were actually doing this would 100x worse than whatever they'd get out of the extra ad targeting. and it would probably be straight-up illegal in a lot of countries. I don't know that much about this stuff so I could be wrong, but the well-known psychological phenomenon that describes what you guys are talking about exactly seems more likely to me

[Phil Williamson]

they claim at least that they don't scan your Messenger convos either. seems at least a little easier to believe that they'd be lying on that one though

[Dungeon Snake]

no way, they totally do this shit. no question. companies like facebook have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about using your data for anything they want

[Bobby Swisha]

Originally Posted by Phil Williamson

I mean some of these are pretty crazy coincidences but like...what else could it be? apparently this is a conspiracy theory that's always popping up but I just can't see it. like I gotta imagine the PR hit if it leaked that they were actually doing this would 100x worse than whatever they'd get out of the extra ad targeting. and it would probably be straight-up illegal in a lot of countries. I don't know that much about this stuff so I could be wrong, but the well-known psychological phenomenon that describes what you guys are talking about exactly seems more likely to me

I've looked into it and there's no real proof one way or the other.

there's a lot of variables involved. facebook and other companies definetly have speech recognition software that they're working on. the question is really if Apple is deploying this, or facebook, or Shazzam, or what? sometime far in the future we might find out that yes, this is actually a thing that's being done. And why not? It's a great way to advertise very specific things, and there's no real law against it.

[Bobby Swisha]

I'm sure if you read the facebook app term agreement there will be some shit that's vague enough to let them "interpret your conversations" or whatever.

[Yamles]

Okay I'm going to test it out over the next week.

things I'm going to talk about include:

An academic institution on a different island to mine
A store that sells bits of paper placed between two bits of cardboard
A chain of places that work on big items that help you move from place to place

[Bobby Swisha]

the ONLY thing that makes me think maybe it's not this is if.... lets say I was talking to that girl about the physical therapy program in Lubbock... facebook picked up on the fact we're close to each other in proximity (possible friends) and picked up on her account's interests somehow, and sent me an advertisement similar to what SHE was interested in... (keep in mind I did not friend this girl on facebook or anything, I was just talking to her, I didn't even get her name.) That seems like maybe it's a little more plausible, but still begs other questions, and still seems kind of weird / creepy and like there might be more to it than that.

[Bobby Swisha]

One other thing I've noticed is that a lot of times when I'm over at somebody else's house I often get advertisements that are almost sexual in nature. I NEVER get stuff like that unless I'm over at somebody's place/apartment and using the internet. I'm not sure if it's advertisements targetting an unsecure network or if it's like... Sending me adverts into shit the apartment owner is into. It always makes me uncomfortable to see it, a few times I've been like "oh shit, wtf is this ad?" out loud only to realize that this could possibly be something the person I'm talking to was looking up, that's being advertised to me, because I'm using their internet.

[Slime]

a

[Izak MD]

Originally Posted by Dungeon Snake

no way, they totally do this shit. no question. companies like facebook have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about using your data for anything they want

my guess is that phil is right, plus you might be so used to googling or typing in info that you do that and forget, only remembering the dm convo

i wonder if somehow facebook can pick up words that your phone saves in he auto complete?!?!?!!?!??

[Evil Ash]

The only thing they track are:

1) Searches in Google
2) Posts/tags/hashtags on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
3) Website history in Chrome

Most likely all of these can be explained that at some point, you typed it in somewhere in a Google owned product.

Every time you sign up/use anything Google, it's in all their agreements that they track and monitor your activity and use it for ads and etc. but it's ONLY for you, and nobody else has access to this data.

To make your web experience "more personal"

Otherwise you'd just get completely random ads. Which is a thing of the past nowadays. Relevant ads/tracking have been around for... a decade, now? Maybe 6-7 years.

[Yamles]

Okay here's an example from today.

My husband has plantar fasciitis in one of his feet and it's been bugging him lately. We were talking about it last night, in person, and I get this today



I have never googled it or talked about it in anyway that wasn't verbally. I thought maybe my husbands laptop had me signed into chrome or something and he had googled it but no.

I know it's probably just what Phil suggested further up but it's also interesting as hell

[Evil Ash]

So at no point in time did anybody use any of your devices or had your Gmail or Chrome or Facebook signed in and typed in the words "plantar fasciitis."?

Hmmn...

[Yamles]

I'm pretty sure not... my husband has searched it himself on his own computer that is logged into his own Facebook and he doesn't have Instagram. I'll ask him when he gets home though.

[Bobby Swisha]

I've had p.f. for a year, it's a total bitch. Get him some birkenstock cork flip flops for the house.

[Bobby Swisha]

My friend just posted this:

[Yamles]

Alright another one



So we started watching shameless a week or so ago and this popped up on my timeline. I haven't talked about it online or anything but I have casted it to the TV from my phone which is logged into Facebook?

[Old Rivers]

That is odd. I actually have been noticing stuff like this a lot recently.