[rigged-system]

I have seen this first hand. At one point, I think I had figured this out because I the Facebook app had access to "Siri results", and "Siri results" is just about anything you do on your phone. We turned off Siri results, but we would still be discussing something out loud like "maybe we should go to Bali some day" and lo and behold, my wife would see ads for Bali in her Facebook stream within 1-2 hours.

[rigged-system]

I want to add one more thing. The ads weren't just for a travel destination. It would be something totally out of character for us like "Let's build a tree house and rent in out on AirBnb" and there would be ads for renting out tree houses.

[aeternus]

They weren't analyzing voice, but what they are doing gets them just as much or more data.

- They watch how quickly you scroll through the news feed at what you pause on, even briefly.

- They have ad deals with many of the sites you probably visit so can determine many of your search terms and interests even if you didn't search those things through Facebook itself.

- They have your friend & family graph and Facebook messenger context. Even if you personally didn't say something, maybe you mentioned it to a friend at some point and they searched it or discussed it in a chat.

[mulmen]

Sure but did you have any other interaction with the internet about these topics? Did you search Google for tree house building codes? Did you search Pinterest or Instagram for ideas?

I have heard this anecdote many times but I don't believe Facebook is actually recording everything we say. Mostly because I don't think our phones have that kind of battery life. I do think they have data on essentially everything you do online.

[fblistener]

I've seen this firsthand as well. I don't know that it was Facebook, but that was the only thing that seemed plausible at the time. My wife had been saying that she'd been getting creepy ads that appeared to be based on things she said out loud. I dismissed it as, "Oh, but you were talking about that because you read about it earlier, and the app noticed you read that story." She wasn't convinced.

Then we watched a random TV show on Netflix. During the show, two characters discussed a very specific medical method of improving their chances of bearing a child. Literally minutes later, she was getting ads for this type of conception therapy. We are both past child bearing age and have not discussed it in probably 20 years. We had never even heard of the specific type of process. We had never looked it up or read anything about it. It definitely came from something listening to our household, but we don't know what. It was way too specific to have been random chance.

We don't fall into the demographics for such an ad in any way. We have Apple devices with Siri, but that seems unlikely given their privacy policies. We don't have any Amazon or Google home devices (or any other types of their devices). She's on FB, and I'm not, so we think it was probably either her laptop or phone listening. She's had mic access on her phone turned off for Facebook and no other apps were running, but these apps have a way of finding their way around such permissions.

[spookthesunset]

Some "smart TV"'s can phone home with TV usage data. I wouldn't be too surprised if there was a shazzam like thing in some smart TV's that can detect certain advertisements.

eg - https://www.cnet.com/how-to/disable-vizio-smart-tv-spying/

Once you match the public IP address of all your devices you can link up the identities and do fun advertising stuff.

[prostoalex]

Did she type any related query into a search engine or browsed some related travel sites (that happened to have Facebook like buttons on them) in-between two events?