Talked about my fave cereals now I see ads for the exact cereals. How?

Another possibility: Perhaps one of y'all ended up bringing up the topic of cereals (and those cereals in specific) because of a new ad campaign one of y'all saw.

You hadn't seen it yet, but lo and behold, you did later.

Personally, I was very sceptical of phones listening. But this paper on [1] "Ultrasonic Device Tracking", has convinced me that the technology is definitely possible.

Apparently it's known as ultrasonic malware and is a type of side-channel attack to leak information to/from devices. So high-frequency audio is transmitted to devices that are listening and can even respond.

The scary thing is that researchers have already found this type of software embedded into [2] many applications.

Now this isn't the same as listening to "human conversations", but it's not hard to believe that some apps are waiting for any audio and just sending it to servers somewhere...

What apps do you have installed on your phone? Any games? Apparently [3] some games listen to you, even in the background...

[1] https://intellisec.de/pubs/2016-batmobile.pdf

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/234-android-a...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/business/media/alphonso-a...

When we bought our first family vehicle we were a little nervous about it being the right choice. After driving it for a while we began to notice how many other people drove the same model. Did other people start driving that type of car because of us? No, we just started paying attention to the frequency of our sighting that model, which led us to the conclusion that it was more popular than we realized.

The same can be true with advertisements.

In the last week this has happened to me twice: once, in a YouTube video being posted by someone that directly related to a conversation I had yet to have and a free flashlight offer appearing in an advertisement on the day I lost power from ice storms. Both were more likely coincidences than anything else.

My wife and I experience this on a regular basis. We even tested it. Picked a subject that is never a conversation piece, we spoke about it with our phones and Amazon's Alexa near by and guess what: an ad that we have never seen showed up within hours that was directly related to this subject... We are convinced that our conversation is minimally listened to if not recorded (for AI training purposes of course).

Most likely explanations:

> Confirmation bias

> Coincidence

> You left other traces on the internet (searches, whatever) which fit into a pattern of people liking specific cereals

I have no proof of how this works, but I worked building digital marketing and ad targeting for a decent portion of my career and have some theories. First, you would be amazed by the amount of data that is flying around about you from different sources, and how specific we could get. And as you know Siri and Alexa are always listening to every word so they can respond to the wake word. I believe recently Amazon admitted to storing all these records IIRC (please correct me if I am mis-remembering it).

Given that I feel that Apple, Amazon and Google all have deals with a number of key marketing companies where they sell your marketing id based on keywords their devices "hear". So they aren't sharing your conversation with third parties but selling your marketing id based upon what they hear, e.g. you start talking about diapers and they'll sell your marketing id tagging diapers. I have done tests with this in creative ways with a few people and we've been able to trigger ads within a very short time period for things that in no way should be showing up and that none of us ever searched for or typed into the computer/device.

I'm all for someone proving me wrong or giving a better explanation but knowing how we dealt with peoples electronic data and what we had available to us I can't imagine they aren't doing this given what we have seen.

Last year around Christmas time I was talking to my wife about what candy I wanted in my stocking. I said something like, "I really like those gold ball candies. I can't remember their name. Maybe ranchero something?"

Then less than an hour later I had an ad on my phone for ferrero rocher candy. It was incredibly creepy.

I know supposedly the Google phone and Google home (in my case a model from Lenovo) doesn't parse your conversation for ads, but I have no other explanation.

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13597225

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13628231

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940240

Did any of your family members search around online while you were talking to them?

What led you to the discussion of cereals in the first place?

This seems like an anecdotal experience that is brought up alot in the last couple years. Ive certainly had some experiences similar to many reported on this thread. However, one more recently was different in an interesting way:

I was talking to a friend of mines who recently had gotten into trading on robinhood and he was just explaining his investing strategy, as it were, to me as we walked through a park we frequent. I had my iphone on me as usual. Anways later that evening I would get one of these spam follow requests on instagram from some investing related personality account; keep in my mind I have essentially never searched for investing/market related info or content ever on my machine and definitely not on instagram, most of whom I follow are celebrities or artists.

If it makes you feel any better I have started seeing cereal ads in my twitter feed since about last week and I don't search or talk about cereal. There is some push for remembering your childhood with cereal going on right now. Mark it down to coincidence.

It's 99% a cognitive bias called Baader–Meinhof phenomenon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...

Either the ad was directed to you via data and criteria totally unrelated to your discussion with your family or the firmware of your brainstem implant has recently been updated.

The former is probably slightly more likely.

You are targeted for this because you are in the network of the one who purchased/searched for it.

Works like a charm with Facebook and items with a high price tab (like high end phones) because the one who search for the phone advices with the end buyer.

I've never seen it for low price tag items. Probably there is an algorithm out there calculating the odds of becoming you a customer. Probably you are on the age target for that brand.

I know you have an iPhone but I used to have a similar experience on Android, by default it records your voice to 'train its voice recognition', which I think is where it came from. I disabled it in the settings and it never happened again.

My wife and I were talking about where to have our kids birthday party. A few days later my wife got a bunch of ads for Chuck e cheeses birthday coupons. she and i both didn't search for anything about kid birthday parties.

True story: Whenever I refer to the article, "PHP is a fractal of bad design" on a call, I get a bunch of wordpress articles in my newsfeed within the hour.

Someone using the same ip (Your wifi router?) googled those terms or went to a product page.

The other involved parties Googled the stuff, maybe.