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A simpler protocol to realize that the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is probably what's happening:

- pick said topic, something you never cared about before, talk about it but don't write any messages containing it; - for 1 month record every ad you see about it; - send a message about the topic; - for another month, record every ad you see about it

Comparing the number of occurrences will tell you what is happening.

You're saying to record ads you see about it on TV or something? (Just to eliminate the "My computer is secretly recording me" angle)

The problem is, your smart TV could be spying you too, if it's capable of voice commands or videoconference. If you discuss sex toys near it, at least some related keywords could make their way to targeted advertising.

My wife and I routinely use ad blockers, private browser windows, browser profiles, and try to use as little ad-supported products as possible. This doesn't stop targeted advertising, I guess because most devices we use connect through the same IP. A couple of days after she starts looking up a city we want to travel to, I'll start receiving ads from airline companies or travel agencies, and even tours/cruises to said city/region. Fighting tracking and spyware is nearly a lost cause unless you become a digital Amish.

Smart TVs in general use IP address to try target devices across households, which is against the privacy policies of a lot of ad tech providers because IPs are not redactable/resettable by an end-user.

The best way for small ad tech providers to compete with "big tech" has been to cross lines that the bigger companies won't cross, this is an example for why there are a lot of profitable ad tech companies in the connected TV / video ads space.

Even if you use a VPN, the TV itself likely has a unique ID for ads, so someone just needs to see one request with both the true IP and the unique device ID and then remember that for the future. It's all very shady. TVs are very far behind the level of user control that phones and browsers provide because there's less scrutiny and its more fragmented across manufacturers (all of which want to get in on ad tech).

You can usually find some opt-out of the identifiers if you dig deep enough into the menus, because multiple laws and regulations require them.

The first thing I did when helping my parents set up their new LG OLED TV's at xmas was to disable all the ads and tracking. It's exhausting how much pressure they put on you to opt-in, and how many layers there are, constantly implying the TV will be nonfunctional without it.

But sure enough, it works just fine with no ads, no "free tv channels", and no voice functionality.

Have you ever checked back to see if updates had re-enabled some of those or introduced new ones? You'd hope they'd let you know if they started getting ads all the time, but the tracking stuff is much less obvious.

LG will send out updates that require you to accept new license agreements when you turn the tv on next. It’s very obvious about what they are tracking but very obnoxious in pointing it out. The parents that OP refers to probably just clicks accept all and moves on.

We have an LG tv and one of my family members hit accept all after an update and now my remote listens to us. To fix this properly I would need to factory reset which loses all of our streaming settings. I actually don’t because I have a separate ISP only for our TVs so there’s a bit of separation between our streaming use and phone activity

I'm talking about every occurrence that might be pushed, so it's the TV ads, webradio ads, search suggestions, ...

It also has to be a topic that advertisers would pay to target you with. You can't talk about something super obscure that advertisers don't care about - like steam engines.

Thanks for this!! Now my email is full of offers to buy historical steam engines, steam engine parts, and engineer hats. Amazon is even advertising a subscription for coal deliveries!

More likely, ads about games on steam.

I've already bought two steam engines this morning. The ads were pretty convincing.

Your inbox is now full of ads for model trains and hobby stores.

There are assuredly advertisers for steam-engine-adjacent products. Memorabilia, experiences/outings, conventions, models, books, artwork, games.

If anyone wants to try this, a friend sent me one link to a device called Levo which does “herb oil infusion” aka it lets you make weed brownies easily. I clicked the one link my friend sent and now I get ads for Levo constantly in my YouTube adroll. Though I should say this is obviously on Google’s ad network specifically and I have no idea if this applies to other networks.

> I clicked the one link my friend sent and now I get ads for Levo constantly

Yes, this retargeting is 'expected' and is not surprising. This is completely different from what OP is describing.

No I realize the differences. I am just saying that if someone wants to see if their encrypted app is resulting in ad serves, they could try discussing this product in encrypted chat only, using the methodology described in the comment I was replying to above.

> pick said topic, something you never cared about before, talk about it but don't write any messages containing it;

This does not work. How did you come about the topic? Answer: it was in your brain, because advertising, trends among your peers and social connections, online trends real or astroturfed, etc.

That's why you end up with people thinking their phone is "listening" to them.

The Brain -- famously incapable of organic thought.

These kind of stories are always fun to analyze using the Socratic method.

-How did you learn about the product?

-Have you ever searched for it?

-Did a friend of yours tell you about it? Do you think they searched for it?

-Are a lot of ads for it playing on TV channels you like? Could instagram know you like those TV channels?

-Is it something your neighbors got? Do you think there has been a spike in shipments of this product to your neighbors?

Eventually people start to “get” that scanning the text of messages is way more helpful for humans than it is for computers. They’ve got other data they can use.

I also have a theory that sometimes when people say "we were talking about <product> and I never even typed it into my phone or anything, and suddenly I started seeing ads for it the next day!" that the person in the story may not have looked up <product>, but someone else in the conversation might have Googled it or browsed an Amazon listing or something and they have some kind of connection in their ad profiles whether it be that they know these 2 people interact a lot, they're in the same geolocation, same wifi network/IP address, etc.

I'm just not convinced of the always on microphones in phones listening for and processing every single thing considering how much battery drain that would cause, whether the processing is done on device or they're sending all that data to a server to be processed.

> I'm just not convinced of the always on microphones in phones listening for and processing every single thing considering how much battery drain that would cause,

We know our phones commonly listen for "smart assistant" prompts and audio beacons (https://www.nanalyze.com/2017/05/audio-beacons-monitor-smart...), so they don't seem to have any trouble abusing the mic access. Honestly without a whistleblower, there's little hope of really understanding how much data a company collects and what they use it for. At least sometimes we can see it in their own marketing materials. For example, https://advertising.roku.com/resources/blog/insights-analysi... tells us:

"Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing. For example, if a streamer is watching an NFL football game and sees an ad for a hard seltzer, Roku’s ACR will know that the ad has appeared on the TV being watched at that time. In this way, the content on screen is automatically recognized, as the technology’s name indicates. The data then is paired with user profile data to link the account watching with the content they’re watching."

None of the people I know who use those devices knew that was happening, but the info was out there at least. When so many people are watching everything you see and do and say who can ever know what every company is doing or what the source of any one ad is?

> "Roughly twice per second, a Roku TV captures video “snapshots” in 4K resolution. These snapshots are scanned through a database of content and ads, which allows the exposure to be matched to what is airing.

There were users under the impression that Roku was unaware of the content it was displaying? Like 4K snapshot or not, if I know a user is watching an NFL stream, I know that ad played.

> There were users under the impression that Roku was unaware of the content it was displaying?

Sure, they expect Roku would know if they launched Disney+ or Netflix, but not that they would knew exactly what movie you were watching or what specific scenes you viewed and for how long. Same with personal videos cast to your screen via roku. It's pretty reasonable they'd know you were streaming content from your other devices, or which apps you were using, but less reasonable that they'd be watching over your shoulder taking notes.

I don't think it can be observed because it's likely a bug. It freaks users out. People uninstall the app and start threads like this.

It's sort of like getting mugged once and then setting up a camera in a bunch of alleys to prove that muggers exist. You can even set up a camera of yourself running into dark alleys every night, but the odds of reproducing a mugging is still extremely low.

There's a certain kind of precision that convinces me it's real though. Precision is common. I look at a book on Amazon, and a FB ad for that book appears.

But I get rejected for a loan via WhatsApp and then used car ads appear for that model of car that I applied a loan for? That's a bit on the nose.

> But I get rejected for a loan via WhatsApp and then used car ads appear for that model of car that I applied a loan for? That's a bit on the nose.

Aside from random coincidence, I could see this happening if you provided your personal information (especially email) for the loan application. It could have been shared to multiple underlying lenders alongside a data vendor who ultimately provided interest targeting (which can include car models) to an ad network.

Getting an ad for that specific model could also have been due to other online activity, such as checking the KBB.

Ah thanks, I didn't know that was possible. It did have email.

If it's integrated into such activities, it might actually be a good explanation for all the other similar scenarios blamed on WhatsApp.

> Getting an ad for that specific model could also have been due to other online activity, such as checking the KBB

I suspect op may have researched the car model and got retargeted: some ad networks keep track of specific products you've shown interest in (not generic interest-areas like Google ads) and track you via a cookie. You may be visiting a completely different site that uses the same network, and get ads on the exact product you've spent minutes reading about.

This is why incognito mode has the warnings it does about “people can still see your screen”

No matter how secure the platform, if you apply for a loan through it, the loan provider will “know” you want a loan, and happily sell that data.

> the odds of reproducing a mugging is still extremely low

I did that and I got a mugging on camera. The attacker was convicted.

This is facebook. They've been caught recording people and selling that for advertising, they deny it because technically your audio is transcripted not recorded and they can send only some keywords back so whole conversations aren't sent back to them.

Source?

We did an experiment. We talked about how hard it is to find highlighter yellow nail polish. Nobody in the house is a purchaser of nail polish nor did we do any searches for highlighter or yellow or nail or polish. A day or two later my wife got an Instagram ad for highlighter yellow nail polish. It could have been a coincidence or maybe they were listening.

Or maybe some combination of things we did previously led naturally to thinking about that yellow nail polish. I'm thinking about something like the trick where you ask somebody a bunch of addition problems that have 14 as the answer (what's 10+4? 2+12? 3+9? etc...) then ask them to name a vegetable and they will almost always say carrot.

Am I missing something? Why carrot?

It's an association thing. I thought carrot too. Maybe it's because of the tedious nature of processing. Maybe it's because the orange bar at the top of the screen makes me think carrot.

I’ve always assumed it’s because of the association of 14 with 14 carat gold.

Interestingly, I've always seen it as any number of quick math problems, not just ones that equal 14, and it consistently works too.

12 year old me was not much of a scientist. I don't think I ever tried any number other than 14...

"I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that, there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays--my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, just in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way." -- Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman"

Do you have the setting that turns on end to end encryption? I thought by default it was off (and always off for group chats) ?

Are you thinking of Telegram? There is no such setting in WhatsApp.

Someone did this trick with me in the '80s, but the numbers were to sum to 13. I still said "carrot", however. Wish I would have thought to use a different number than 13 when I tried it out on others.

Ah yes, a bunch of anecdotes in reply.

Plenty of research and news stories about this if you care to search. The speculative part of my comment is about the transcription which I'm speculating because of their fervent denials despite evidence which technically their wording in their denial statements is correct.

If I had to guess, your whatsapp messages are e2e secured but keywords are sent to facebook when they match some condition. So if you message "happy birthday" to someone, they won't see that but the fact that the keyword "birthday" was found even if the word isn't included is sent to fb. That way they can say they're not snooping your messages.

Would they argue that the message goes first into a neural network that outputs potential product labels based on the message and that it all happens client-side? That's the only way I see it possible for them not to violate the E2EE.

An important thing you’re missing is the control. You should record every ad.

You need to know if you got 3 topics of ads every day and 1/3 of them are related to that secret topic, OR if you get 300 topics every day and 1/300 are related to that secret topic. If it’s the former, it’s suspicious, if it’s the latter, it’s way less suspicious.

The control is the topic you pick that you don’t discuss on WhatsApp or messenger. The idea is random differences between topics should average out over many trials.

I still think it’s important to consider the volume of topics that show up that aren’t being explicitly looked for.

I’ve gotten Instagram ads for ketamine and I absolutely am not discussing or searching for it. I probably wouldn’t even notice a random topic if it’s not so absurd. I’m sure there’s tons of topics I don’t even realize I see.

The reason for the control I suggested is to try to counteract the bias people have towards noticing things they recently thought about. I think the question of what adverts people are shown in general is interesting but quite separate.

You can’t come up with the topics yourself either, because the topics you will think up are different based on your demographic / type of person you are, and ad networks basically try to guess that.

The idea is that you may discover the topics you don’t talk about that week still come up as much as those you do.

You can if you first come up with a list of topics, and then once you have that list, randomly assign each of those topics to one of the three categories.

There will be some bias in what they choose to screenshot right? Meaning, the unrelated topic might show up in the feed but they don’t screenshot it because it doesn’t fit the narrative?

Also, what we’re interested is if the text changed what was shown. If I saw ads for X last week but didn’t notice them, then spoke to a friend and noticed them and took a screenshot, it would appear to confirm the theory. Even though I was always seeing ads for X.

Ultimately, I don’t think people who are convinced of this theory will change their minds so it’s a moot point.

Yeah, that’s the biggest flaw in the experiment I proposed, I think. This is the reason I try to have the hopefully independent grading of ad-topic-relevancy blinded to which system the topic was communicated over. It may be that one sees many vaguely related ads for the WhatsApp topic due to some selection bias but a similar number of actually related ads.

I call this the gaslighting explanation: “no, it definitely wasn’t the messaging product owned by an advertising behemoth. You must have searched for it somewhere else.” Obviously the OP remembers where they’ve seen the product. If they has seen the product elsewhere, they wouldn’t have started this thread!