this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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especially as it doesn't even happen.
"oh yeah well how come I was talking about something mundane, common and extremely popular and then but 4 days later saw an ad for it?!?!?"
big mystery indeed
You're getting some downvotes, but yes, lol. I mean I'm not sure there's never any surreptitious hot mic eavesdropping going on, but people definitely often assume so when there's a more parsimonious explanation, e.g.:
Most peoples' ads are targeted based on more mundane technology, and they see hundreds of ads per day, so if even 1% of their ads overlap with something that they were just talking about, they'll still be fairly likely to see a spooky "I was just talking about that!" ad relatively frequently. Not to mention that they're likely to be thinking about a thing because their platforms are also proactively marketing that thing to them. Just pareidolia, no eavesdropping necessary.
Doesn't mean eavesdropping isn't happening-- Just means it doesn't need to be happening for that effect to occur.
I'm in marketing, I subscribe all all marketing new sources, I run a martech stack of a bunch of different channels: paid 3rd party syndication, search intent, ecosystem intent, technographics, firmographics, psychegraphics, funding round research, paid and organic social, paid and organic SEO, display, video, in app placements, new hiring intent... none of these platforms offer me "conversational intent"
so it's only usage would be if
a) you are already cooked (or server side ID'd) b) your conversation procs a buying intent signal for an affinity cluster c) they secretly inject that signal into the data and obfuscate its source
well, now you just have worse data that's also illegal. So what's the motivation?
It is rarely some coincidence and has more to do with extrapolating data.
If you talk with a friend about getting a pet, your phone and by extension the ad company that receives your location data, knows you 2 saw each other.
If that other person searched for pet food, then you will also receive ads for pet food even though you "only talked about it".
Other example, you post you have a new job on Facebook (which a lot of people do). Facebook knows where you live because of location data, and they know where the company is located since it is public data. So they know how close those 2 are. If Facebook then looks through your photos and notices none of them have a picture of a bike in the last 5 years. Then you are likely to buy a bike in order to go to work. Thus you get ads for bikes.