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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I'm inclined to dismiss it as confirmation bias, but I've had this experience personally - a conversation followed shortly by an extremely specific advertisement on FB shortly thereafter.

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As suggested in the comments on Reddit, there's another possible explanation for this -- someone else in the conversation does a search based on what you were talking about, clicks on a result that sends tracking data to Facebook, and then the ads are retargeted to you based on a shared public IP address.

The last time I noticed this, it was a conversation between my wife and I, and I (we) poked around in her search history for that reason. Nothing that I could see, and it was within minutes of the conversation.

All that said, I still lean towards confirmation bias.

Could be shared IP or even just "target people located near people who are targets" since they have location data

I wonder how likely it is that this sort of thing happens without a mic being involved. Consider that Facebook already mines all sorts of Facebook data, as well as data from websites you visit. They much have a pretty good profile of people's interests.

Given that, it's fairly probably that you will be shown ads about things that you are interested in, and it's fairly probably that you'll talk about these topics with friends. Given this and the number of people that use Facebook, it's probably not that unlikely that your experience happens simply by chance fairly frequently.

The odds of something like that happening JUST AFTER you've spoken aloud about it should be small. Too small even for a dozen "random" events, even considering the number of Facebook users.

My partner is convinced this happens, she even tried to run experiments trying to say random things and see if they show up. None of the experiments worked out, but I have to admit some of the coincidences are interesting. But not so much advertising, just any content that ends up in the feed. I'm more on the side of confirmation bias.

I just want to add that this has also happened to my wife and I multiple times and with very specific ads showing up, shortly after the conversation.

As I’m curious, are you using Android or iOS? I can’t prove it, but I find it suspect this happens on iOS, but I know from first hand experience it’s technically possible on Android.

I worry about facebook and all that and the state of privacy in the modern world, but a lot of these stories sound a lot like confirmation bias to be honest.

That'd be why I started my post with "I'm inclined to dismiss it as confirmation bias..."

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