>The majority of "ordinary" people I interact with believe Facebook is listening to their conversations 24/7. It's been brought up multiple times on HN. I see

>The majority of "ordinary" people I interact with believe Facebook is listening to their conversations 24/7. It's been brought up multiple times on HN. I see this a bunch when people say, they talked about an item with someone then google showed them an ad. Sure, perhaps all that data is being processed, but more likely, it's predictive and they know who in your social circle knows about this item. Your friend read a story about it, searched for it on amazon. People are still in this mode where they don't realize how much info leaks without capturing any conversation, and how good prediction is/can be at this point. So the only explanation is that we're being spied on all the time because I don't think people can wrap their minds around prediction models that are this good. There are stories from 10 years ago of advertising agencies knowing that someone is pregnant before they did and ten years later, the general public assumes they have to have the original thought first so FAAMG knows what to sell them.