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I recall there were quite a few experiments where people use certain keywords heavily just to get closely related ads later on. I can totally relate my experience with it as well. Of course it is inconclusive - but if there is an incentive, management of big companies will venture into it. And chinese management is no different from western ones to that matter.

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They don't pick the keywords uniformly randomly from a list of all keywords though. They think they randomly picked something that popped up in their mind, but those keywords are either

- stuff they saw online recently — ads or otherwise, which put the keywords in their mind

- or stuff they were already interested in recently

Not hard to imagine targeting algorithms picking up on either of these

As I tell my friends

You dont see those "coincidental" ads because your phone is listening to you, you see them because your freind showed interest in the product and theirs enough information to infer they talked to you about it. The good news is, your phone isn't listening to you without your consent. The bad news is, because it doesnt need to.

Are those your assumptions or something that have been tested?

It's been a while since I browsed anything without an ad blocker.

Do you still get ads for the exact thing you just bought for a week after buying it? :)

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