haven't had that yet but I've had conversations with my dentist about watches which I've never googled or searched for and the next day i started getting amazon emails about those watch brands.

I've also taken a pictures of items on my vacation and then started getting ads about those same brand items.

Little off-topic. But as an IT guy myself, I think it's quite amazing how far we have come with our algorithms that are able to decipher verbal conversations, contextual, and location data in order to convey these types of ads to the consumer. It's remarkable, and extremely complicated.

It's a shame that so much of this technology isn't being utilized for better means to improve our lives.

that's fucked up

This.

So I went to a restaurant for a friend's bday and his other friends are all spanish. We're waiting for a table and everyone around me is speaking spanish only. I look up the restaurant on my phone to look at the menu and the website asks me if I want

ESPANOL

I don't speak spanish and have never looked up anything in spanish. Looking at that same website now it doesn't ask me if I want the site in spanish anymore.

^^ This could potentially be due to your phone's location service taking note of you being at a Spanish place, looking for their menu.

There is no doubt Google / Apple is snooping on you, but hey, what do I know?

Wasn't a spanish place. Just a reg chain restaurant

Whoa~ That is kind of creepy... :denied:

Say anything that remotely sounds like Siri on an idevice like "serious", cereal/Serial" etc. Yeah, the mic is on. My coworker's iphone always responds when she says "serious". I make sure to fap very loudly next to my phone's speaker so the folks at google find me some better fuckin' porn.

on a separate note, Pixel XL 128gb for sale. screen protector always on, always in case. May have some crust off the side.

Before i left for my trip last week i told my bf i was "late". I was holding my note 4 in my hand. Its not connected with a network.. No sim. Use it for games, music and rs.
After that all my ads were alternating between tampons or pregnancy tests. I didnt search anything baby related. COINCIDENCE???? I think fucking not.

The government is watching all of us, all the time. Ive put stickers over my front facing cameras on my laptop/ipads lol.

Sometimes i like to talk about cocaine to throw them off. Like am i reliable or not?? Keep em on their toes.

If you're female, and any of the sites/searches are female-related then that makes sense. The word "late" alone seems unlikely to go immediately to that.

Nope. I didn't search anything that could indicate anything about female periods. I even checked my search history back into 3 weeks...nothing about menstruation or babies. The phone i also keep my period calendar is my LG so that doesnt make sense either. I did go into detail about how "late" = no period with my bf = maybe a baby, I saved you guys those details for obvious reasons lol but I guess not so obvious for some.

I get ads on revscene (male/car dominant) and while I'm playing my games on my phone the ad will pause my game to pop up. I dunno what the heck app I have that the ads pop up during app use. I've tried deleting everything I don't use and they still come up and it drives me crazy.

Not specifically periods, but if there's anything to indicate the user is female then seeing tampon and pregnancy test ads is gonna be pretty likely. It's not like a woman having a period is a rare thing lol.

As for the ads during games, that's built into the game. Try switching off wifi before starting it up.

Is it at all possible that there are always ads popping up everywhere that you just don't notice them until it does strike something that you talked about previously so your brain is wired to notice it as suspicious?

Because the same thing happened to me recently, I can't remember what it was but for sure I have never googled because I didn't even know what it was. My friend was telling me about it, then I get home and some ads popping up had that item.

Of course your phone listens to you all the time. How do you think it response to "Hey Siri", "Ok Google", "Alexa". It always passively listen and search for the trigger word. I'd hazard a guess that it compiles keywords and push personalized ads but otherwise, store no data of the conversations.

These AIs constantly learn and adapt and getting better and better without much human intervention.

I highly doubt government entities have any pieces in this though. These companies are global and are too huge to have to risk their customers. Their lawyer teams can probably go head to head against the government's if needed to. NSA probably salivates at the tech capabilities but probably told to kick rocks.

Pretty much this – frequency illusion & confirmation bias. If you buy a new car, you'll start noticing people with the same car everywhere.

Also the fact this phenomenon seems to have just come up all over the place recently, when it was probably happening all along. People are noticing it now because it's being mentioned more:

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...is%20listening

I admit I fell for it too. Was talking about Sonos black friday deals with my Chiro last weekend and lo and behold right after, Sonos ads. But then again, I am pretty much in their target demo.

Wife was complaining about neck pain yesterday, after sleeping on it wrong overnight. Today this ad starts popping up on my feeds (facebook and ig)

https://i.imgur.com/blRiG7j.jpg

We went out for lunch with my parents, and my sister and her husband. They're having a baby in April, and was talking about the only purchase they made is a Pack 'n Play bassinet thing. This morning, I receive an email about deals on Graco Pack 'n Play stuff!

For those who are using Android phones / tablets, make sure you have disabled the Google Voice assistant configuration. Double check, and occassionally go back into the setting and check again, cuz for at least 2 or 3 times, I have found that the option to have my phone listen to me saying "OK Google" is enabled.

I do have Google Assistant turned on, but have always set the setting to listen only when the Google App or the Google Assistant has been opened. I suspect that the setting must have been reset back to listening on me all the time when some part of the phone -- be it the OS updates or the App updates -- were installed.

The exact steps to turn that off seems to have changed a bit every now and then as well, and even though I kind of know where / what to look for -- "OK Google" -- it always takes me a while before I can track it down.

You could try turning off personalized ads on your phone.

Unless you're making note of what ads you're seeing over time, and able to actually confirm that you weren't presented with a particular type of ad until after you phone may have "heard" it then these could all just be frequency illusion & confirmation bias. Using SkinnyPupp as an example, chances are you would've just skimmed past neck pain ads without even noticing them until your wife mentioned it.

Probably good idea to go back and check/adjust settings after any update as well

I have an android samsung and I have repeatedly and purposely said "handbags" and "laser eye surgery" over and over with the phone in proximity. I even told my friends what I was doing and they go out of the way to say the key words once in a while when my phone is near.

This has gone on for a month, no ads for hand bags or laser eye surgery yet.

Do you have Facebook installed?

Went to my chiro last week and we talked about he’s going to work in Dubai for a year. The next two days straight all I got on YouTube were ads for ‘tourism Dubai” and emirates flights or whatever. Never in my life have I ever talked about or even thought of Dubai, let alone seeing ads for it.

It’s totally one thing if I am searching up car parts then get targeted ads for summit racing’s but this is too far