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The scarier thing to me is when ads match _conversations_ I have with my wife. I told her about this story this morning, and she reminded me about a conversatio

The scarier thing to me is when ads match _conversations_ I have with my wife. I told her about this story this morning, and she reminded me about a conversation about stem cell research we had yesterday. I said something along the lines of 'I hope there is a breakthrough soon on regenerating the Isle of Langerhans in the pancreas to treat diabetes.' Sure enough, she noticed an article in her Google News feed later that day related to diabetes. Once or twice may be a coincidence. Maybe. But this happens regularly and with startling specificity. What could be listening? I'm a technologist like the rest of you. I know apps need permissions to the mic, I know it's not easy for an app to stay in the foreground. Is it my Roku? My smart TV? Makes one want to go full Richard Stallman. p.s. my wife just said it would be really funny if Google News showed an article now on people worrying about their tech listening to their conversations. I'll post an update if that happens...

bombcar 4y ago
It's possible some of it is simply Baader Meinhof https://www.healthline.com/health/baader-meinhof-phenomenon https://www.healthline.com/health/baader-meinhof-phenomenon but it could be something deeper (or something forgotten). If my wife asks me about something, I often search or google it almost without thinking, even if I never use any results. It should be possible to run scientifically sound experiments to show if it's happening.
mariojv 4y ago
It is totally weird when this kind of thing happens. I attribute it to my husband Googling and clicking on links related to our conversation with IP based tracking. I've found Instagram showing me things more related to my husband's interests if I haven't used it in a while.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Swizec 4y ago
As creepy as this is whenever it happens, I remain convinced it’s observation bias. Because of how often it doesn’t happen. Quoth Richard Feynman: > “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” You were gonna see ads, or news stories, or whatever. You happened to see this one. And it happened to connect to a conversation you were having. Amazing! What magic!? Well how many other ads or other times didnt it connect to a conversation and you just don’t remember because it didn’t feel special? Probably many more times than it did work. Lately I’ve been trying to find alternate explanations. Hm we were talking about going to a restaurant tomorrow. Why is my girlfriend getting all these restaurant ads on instagram all of a sudden? Oh right, because it’s Thursday, we live in a city, I searched Google for “Good Friday restaurants for a date” during our conversation, and we live on the same IP.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Google probably gets higher CTR by showing you many different ads that are oddly specific rather than ads that are more general. Once in a while, they will get one right, and it will feel creepy.
- snowmizuh-04 4y ago
  I love the Feynman reference. Thank you. And this may be right. However, I also am reminded of Nassim Taleb's Fat Tony, who when asked 'what are the odds of flipping a coin heads 10 times in a row?' responds with 'fuggehdabowdit. it's a hustle.' There's a scientific response, which can be very naive in some ways, and there's the Fat Tony street analysis. As I've gotten older, I tend to value the latter.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    Oh I’m not saying they’re not trying. I’m more saying that they aren’t as good as it sometimes looks. Humans are very good at finding patterns in happy little accidents. Much better than the ad networks are in making those accidents happen. If the tech was as good as they say, we’d never ever see an ad that wasn’t a hyper relevant instant click. And it seems unlikely that Apple is selling my iMessage conversations to Facebook. The “we searched for it, created an explicit signal, and forgot because it’s such a habit” explanation seems more likely. Plus if a simpler method like “hey your location is at a restaurant on most Fridays, why don’t we start pushing restaurant ads on Wednesday” works well enough, why wouldn’t they use it?
  - orangecat 4y ago
    As I've gotten older, I tend to value the latter. Definitely a good perspective to keep in mind. But at Facebook scale, if a billion people flip an actually fair coin 10 times, around a million of them will get 10 heads. It would be understandable for those people to conclude that the coin is biased, but they'd be wrong.
    - FabHK 4y ago
      Right. And 0.1% of them, 1000, will post here on HN how this can't possibly be a coincidence.
spmurrayzzz 4y ago
This may or may not apply to the anecdote you shared about your wife, but since these apps know your relative proximal location to your weak/strong social connections, they also can know what your friends may search for and is often-used flavor of targeting. e.g. You and a bunch of friends go to dinner and have a conversation about <topic x>, at least one of those friends googles something about that topic. You later see an ad related to <topic x> because you were targeted based on the search your friend did while they were near you. If your wife potentially did anything digitally, related to the diabetes topic, its likely that you were targeted based on that. Again, no idea what happened resultant to the story you shared, but whenever this sort of thing happens to me I try to appeal to Occam's Razor based on how much I know about how this tech works under the hood.
- snowmizuh-04 4y ago
  I thought of this. Just to be clear, neither she nor I did any searching on diabetes or anything like that. I can understand this being driven by search, chats, emails, etc. (basically any type of keyboard input). But here, the mode of communication was voice-only.
  - spmurrayzzz 4y ago
    Yea I've definitely had situations where I've been challenged in this way (in which I definitely was having a voice-only conversation that seemed to be targeted after the fact). It can be vexing. It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but this is where Baader Meinhof may apply. I don't how many times I've seen a targeted ad that was a "miss" in terms of recency bias. But I absolutely remember every time there was a "hit". Both situations were targeted based on my digital behavior, but they're playing the volume shooter game. Taking as many shots as possible hoping eventually they score. This could be true in your case. The fact that you and your wife were having a recurring conversation about stem cell research, diabetes, etc. suggests that its likely that this is in your digital fingerprint at least once in the past (recent or otherwise). Something I try to do now, when I'm being mindful about it, is note how often I see ads that are definitely in my interest bucket but are completely uncorrelated with any recent conversations I've had. That helps at least establish an anecdotal ratio of hits-to-misses that makes the Orwellian/dystopian much less reasonable on balance.
prego_xo 4y ago
I'm seeing a lot of people trying to rationalize and excuse this behavior from Google, but man is it a hard sell on me. My mother recently remarked in a unique conversation that we have had a box of Golden Grahams cereal for a year and should find a recipe to use it up. She opened her phone to search, and lo and behold, the top recommendation after only two letters, R and e, was "Golden Grahams recipes". Not only had that never been a topic of conversation or search beforehand, nor did she have Google open on her phone, but you may have noticed that "Golden Grahams recipes" doesn't even start with R or e. This sparked a long conversation about how privacy really is something worth fighting for. My only guess is that Google has the ability to listen in because we use Android phones.
snovv_crash 4y ago
It just happened right here on HN... clearly HN is spying on your conversations /s
Melatonic 4y ago
I would setup NextDNS free version, add a ton of blockers, link your devices correctly to it, and then see if it still occurs. NextDNS is not going to block a lot of stuff but if there is a significant change then at least you have an easy way to show it. Setup is quick and easy relatively

bombcar 4y ago

It's possible some of it is simply Baader Meinhof https://www.healthline.com/health/baader-meinhof-phenomenon https://www.healthline.com/health/baader-meinhof-phenomenon but it could be something deeper (or something forgotten). If my wife asks me about something, I often search or google it almost without thinking, even if I never use any results. It should be possible to run scientifically sound experiments to show if it's happening.

mariojv 4y ago

It is totally weird when this kind of thing happens. I attribute it to my husband Googling and clicking on links related to our conversation with IP based tracking. I've found Instagram showing me things more related to my husband's interests if I haven't used it in a while.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Swizec 4y ago

As creepy as this is whenever it happens, I remain convinced it’s observation bias. Because of how often it doesn’t happen. Quoth Richard Feynman: > “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight... I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” You were gonna see ads, or news stories, or whatever. You happened to see this one. And it happened to connect to a conversation you were having. Amazing! What magic!? Well how many other ads or other times didnt it connect to a conversation and you just don’t remember because it didn’t feel special? Probably many more times than it did work. Lately I’ve been trying to find alternate explanations. Hm we were talking about going to a restaurant tomorrow. Why is my girlfriend getting all these restaurant ads on instagram all of a sudden? Oh right, because it’s Thursday, we live in a city, I searched Google for “Good Friday restaurants for a date” during our conversation, and we live on the same IP.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Google probably gets higher CTR by showing you many different ads that are oddly specific rather than ads that are more general. Once in a while, they will get one right, and it will feel creepy.
snowmizuh-04 4y ago
I love the Feynman reference. Thank you. And this may be right. However, I also am reminded of Nassim Taleb's Fat Tony, who when asked 'what are the odds of flipping a coin heads 10 times in a row?' responds with 'fuggehdabowdit. it's a hustle.' There's a scientific response, which can be very naive in some ways, and there's the Fat Tony street analysis. As I've gotten older, I tend to value the latter.
- Swizec 4y ago
  Oh I’m not saying they’re not trying. I’m more saying that they aren’t as good as it sometimes looks. Humans are very good at finding patterns in happy little accidents. Much better than the ad networks are in making those accidents happen. If the tech was as good as they say, we’d never ever see an ad that wasn’t a hyper relevant instant click. And it seems unlikely that Apple is selling my iMessage conversations to Facebook. The “we searched for it, created an explicit signal, and forgot because it’s such a habit” explanation seems more likely. Plus if a simpler method like “hey your location is at a restaurant on most Fridays, why don’t we start pushing restaurant ads on Wednesday” works well enough, why wouldn’t they use it?
- orangecat 4y ago
  As I've gotten older, I tend to value the latter. Definitely a good perspective to keep in mind. But at Facebook scale, if a billion people flip an actually fair coin 10 times, around a million of them will get 10 heads. It would be understandable for those people to conclude that the coin is biased, but they'd be wrong.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    Right. And 0.1% of them, 1000, will post here on HN how this can't possibly be a coincidence.

spmurrayzzz 4y ago

This may or may not apply to the anecdote you shared about your wife, but since these apps know your relative proximal location to your weak/strong social connections, they also can know what your friends may search for and is often-used flavor of targeting. e.g. You and a bunch of friends go to dinner and have a conversation about <topic x>, at least one of those friends googles something about that topic. You later see an ad related to <topic x> because you were targeted based on the search your friend did while they were near you. If your wife potentially did anything digitally, related to the diabetes topic, its likely that you were targeted based on that. Again, no idea what happened resultant to the story you shared, but whenever this sort of thing happens to me I try to appeal to Occam's Razor based on how much I know about how this tech works under the hood.

snowmizuh-04 4y ago
I thought of this. Just to be clear, neither she nor I did any searching on diabetes or anything like that. I can understand this being driven by search, chats, emails, etc. (basically any type of keyboard input). But here, the mode of communication was voice-only.
- spmurrayzzz 4y ago
  Yea I've definitely had situations where I've been challenged in this way (in which I definitely was having a voice-only conversation that seemed to be targeted after the fact). It can be vexing. It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but this is where Baader Meinhof may apply. I don't how many times I've seen a targeted ad that was a "miss" in terms of recency bias. But I absolutely remember every time there was a "hit". Both situations were targeted based on my digital behavior, but they're playing the volume shooter game. Taking as many shots as possible hoping eventually they score. This could be true in your case. The fact that you and your wife were having a recurring conversation about stem cell research, diabetes, etc. suggests that its likely that this is in your digital fingerprint at least once in the past (recent or otherwise). Something I try to do now, when I'm being mindful about it, is note how often I see ads that are definitely in my interest bucket but are completely uncorrelated with any recent conversations I've had. That helps at least establish an anecdotal ratio of hits-to-misses that makes the Orwellian/dystopian much less reasonable on balance.

prego_xo 4y ago

I'm seeing a lot of people trying to rationalize and excuse this behavior from Google, but man is it a hard sell on me. My mother recently remarked in a unique conversation that we have had a box of Golden Grahams cereal for a year and should find a recipe to use it up. She opened her phone to search, and lo and behold, the top recommendation after only two letters, R and e, was "Golden Grahams recipes". Not only had that never been a topic of conversation or search beforehand, nor did she have Google open on her phone, but you may have noticed that "Golden Grahams recipes" doesn't even start with R or e. This sparked a long conversation about how privacy really is something worth fighting for. My only guess is that Google has the ability to listen in because we use Android phones.

snovv_crash 4y ago

It just happened right here on HN... clearly HN is spying on your conversations /s

Melatonic 4y ago

I would setup NextDNS free version, add a ton of blockers, link your devices correctly to it, and then see if it still occurs. NextDNS is not going to block a lot of stuff but if there is a significant change then at least you have an easy way to show it. Setup is quick and easy relatively