Ask HN: Why does my iPhone show me ads relevant to a dinner conversation? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does my iPhone show me ads relevant to a dinner conversation?

6 pointsdctoedt10 comments

Last night — for the second day in a row — I had a dinner-table conversation with my iPhone 16 in my pocket AND with microphone access "off" for essentially all apps including various Google apps and Facebook. Later, Facebook showed me ads relating to dinner-conversation topics.

Example: Last night the conversation briefly included a discussion of fountain pens. A couple of hours later, Facebook showed me two different ads relating to fountain pens. I've not done anything online relating to fountain pens in many moons.

Anyone know what's happening? (On my laptop I did a DuckDuckGo search using Safari, because I'm not sure I can trust Google about this; I also deleted all Google apps and Facebook from my phone.)

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1. Geo data - someone else in your conversation was searching for fountain pens. Anyone in the proximity could also be getting those ads.

2. Inception - you may have been getting ads/content about fountain pens before the conversation and not noticed it until the conversation. Perhaps the topic entered your mind inorganically.

I can assure you the same phenomenon has happened to me even when camping in the woods without phones.

Even if these platforms were sneaking enormous quantities of voice data over carrier networks without anyone noticing, 5 minutes of interacting with a voice assistant should put to bed any worry that they would be able to extract useful information from a long string of muffled audio.

Maybe they save the good voice recognition tech on ads.

It's possible that it's still listening to you. It's possible that it's not. It's also quite possible that you're in the range of other listening and facial recognition devices that you do not have control over. Always be suspect of TVs in public locations.

The other possibility is to examine what brought up the topic of fountain pens. Because these advertising companies have gotten very good at putting together models of thought processes based on completely innocuous and oftentimes data that we don't even consider as relevant. They are able to assemble this into a list of probable things you would be interested in and then advertise that to you.

I suggest that as a possibility because oftentimes we think topics are unrelated or they are abnormal and random things that come up but that is rarely so. The way the mind works how it maps data together can seem disconnected in random but it's often not. So those patterns of how the brain assembles memories thoughts and reasoning can be deduced and exploited. So It can seem like you had a conversation about pens that is completely unrelated to any other things you have been doing lately but it may not actually be. The way your mind drove you to having a discussion about fountain pens is simply the same way the advertising companies new to present targeted ads to you about it.

I suspect it is somewhat a combination of both of these things.

> It's also quite possible that you're in the range of other listening and facial recognition devices that you do not have control over.

Dining room at home, not in range of anything else with a microphone that I can think of.

Thanks for the info — it's helpful.

Is it possible your conversation partner had looked up fountain pens recently?

> Is it possible your conversation partner had looked up fountain pens recently?

Yes, that's possible — I'd given her a pretty-nice fountain pen that'd been in my desk drawer, unused, for many years (it was a speaker thank-you gift long ago); last night she said she'd been using it, so she might well have done some Google searching on the subject.

I’m pretty sure Google et al will use IP addresses to target others in the same household.

This was discussed several times, some reasons can be:

- people you had dinner with searched for pens and you got connected to them via geo matching, wifi connection etc

- you had ads on pens before but just haven't paid enough attention

- ...

> people you had dinner with searched for pens and you got connected to them via geo matching, wifi connection etc

I wonder if this can be used to subtly influence others. There’s been a few times where I had been researching something but then my partner brought it up as their original idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Maybe the ads were already there the whole time?

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