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One explanation I've heard for mysterious "We were talking about it in person but nothing else" ads, is that if you were connecting to the internet from the sam
by jrochkind1 4y ago
One explanation I've heard for mysterious "We were talking about it in person but nothing else" ads, is that if you were connecting to the internet from the same Wi-Fi access point or IP address as someone else that did a web search on the topic or visited websites on the topic, it has connected you by way of shared internet connection.
Is it possible something like that happened?
In general, while anything is possible, my own occam's razor calculation is that if someone does have a way to get through ostensibly end-to-end encrypted messages, it's going to be government actors saving it for law enforcement/national security purposes. They wouldn't "waste" it on ad targetting. And if it's being secretly used for ad targeting so many people would know about it, people who aren't disciplined military bound by law to secrecy, that it would be quite likely to get out and be revealed and no longer secret.
- sva_ 4y agoBeing on the same network is not even necessary. Meta can still see who talked to whom at what time, and that would be sufficient to correlate the interests of both individuals.
- brewmarche 4y agoMy thought exactly. As an experiment I would compare talking about new topics in person only vs. on WhatsApp. Actually there is a huge explosion of variations you can actually test: verbal communication with and without devices present (in case you also suspect audio recording), WhatsApp communication but no verbal, combinations, same network and different networks, etc.