I'm not crazy, things are listening | Hacker News Reader

I'm not crazy, things are listening

9 pointsmring336215 comments

Background: both my wife and I carry modern smart phones. We also have a Sonos One with Alexa in the living room.

Incident 1: Living room TV was on and an RCN ad for Eero-based WiFi was playing. Wife said we should get that, as she thinks our current router (Archer C7) is not great. Just a few minutes later, at my nearby workstation, Amazon advertised Eero bundles to me on its front page. I had actually opened Amazon to price Eero systems, but had not even clicked on the search box yet!

Incident 2: We ran out of cone filters for our pour-over coffee, so my wife said that we should dig out out old Aeropress. I got it out, washed the dust off and then told her that I couldn't find the Aeropress filters (little round paper disks). She couldn't find them either. This was a conversation mostly held in the kitchen, not very close to the Sonos. The next day, Facebook began advertising some gold-plated, reusable Aeropress filter. I had never searched for the Aeropress filters online.

I wanted to hear what other people think about this. Thanks.

There is a thing in psychology called "observational bias" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect) which is why when you buy a car of a certain model you tend to see more of that model on the road. Our brains filter out so much noise that when we expect to see something, our perceptions don't filter it out, and we see more of it.

This can make you believe someone else is "listening in to you" when it is really just your subconscious changing some of the filtering it does ...

We used to do it just for fun with friends when we were bored.

We just found a super stupid subject that we all know that's not related to any of us (noone searched for it) and then for 1 hour we spoke only about the subject

Day later and one of my friends started to see ads related to it

I'm not sure if they listen or not, but one thing is for sure It's a damn fun game

Amazon owns Eero. It would not surprise me to find that when they run an ad on TV, they also promote that product on the Amazon front page for visitors soon after the ad ran who are coming from the region the ad ran in. No listening required.

Similar experience.

I was on a trip this summer with my girlfriend and at some point we talked about a particular bag of a particular brand. She wanted to buy it and we talked about trying to find a store in the city we were in.

The next day she had ads of the same exact bag in her IG feed. We never did any research online of the bag so we assumed the phones were listening.

On top of that, none of us are english so we spoke in our native language.

On one short meeting, someone speaks about Revolut card. Couple hours later on my Instagram account start to appear's ad's regarding Revolut. And I'm sure that there were none before.

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