What's scarier than secretly reading messages is the idea that we are being manipulated into believing that we thought of the "random item" all on our own, inst

What's scarier than secretly reading messages is the idea that we are being manipulated into believing that we thought of the "random item" all on our own, instead of it being cleverly triggered by a series of manipulative ads or posts from friends. Or, a similar idea is that ad companies don't really need to know anything about you so long as all your friends are "unprotected". For example, you may pick "lawn furniture" as your "totally random" item to test WhatsApp. What you don't remember is that a good friend mentioned lawn furniture to you 3 days ago and just did 14 web searches on Google and FB marketplace to find some. They have strong metadata ties to you, so you get served ads on that topic too.