[brody_hamer]

I’m basing my reasoning on the assumption that advertisers (such as google, meta, tictoc) are aware of your location at all times. (See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909921)

Based on this assumption, it wouldn’t be necessary for any of your friends to search for the topic during an evening together.. it would simply be enough that one of the friends showed some interest in the topic prior to the hangout (searched for something, read a blog, stopped for too long on an instagram reel).

Then, during an evening together, your phones all share the same location (and possibly movement). That’s enough for advertisers to suspect there’s some relationship there. Enough of an association to attempt an ad placement (or instagram reel) for a particular obscure topic.

[anenefan]

I'd agree on assuming that certain apps do or try as best they can with an aim to track not only location but presence of other wifi bluethooth device ids with time stamps, to help build patterns and a unique fingerprint for marketing purposes - on the basis it can once the app is given (accidentally perhaps) the necessary permissions.

As such, if location or device id data were available to build a larger picture, for any sort of common topic I'd agree the advertising could easily be a result of data analysis of various subsets of phones in a given region, applying algorithms and feeding it back into search results.

However like I said, the stuff was apparently way way out there zany - he ensured me he would ever bother searching for it. So zany in fact no one would ever bother. For all I know he may have ruled out other people and have just been talking to his pet dog and various other tame native animals that hang around his verandah. I would tend to believe way way out there as after a small smoke around me he's dribbling worthless bs. There's no low bar on my part either - something like if polka dot dogs exist I could accept as something that might / could be searched the next day by anyone who was involved in such a out there conversation, and as a result skew search results.

Any how I'm settled on it's one of the many worthless apps on his phone that exists because a website is not desktop friendly - as they say if the service is free, you're the product ...