Why you’re getting shown creepy ads after chatting with your friends

I'm back from a week at my mom's house and now I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I've been putting in my mouth for a week. We never talked about this brand or googled it or anything like that. As a privacy tech worker, let me explain why this is happening. 🧵

When I stumbled across the Twitter thread above, it reminded me of all those anecdotes I have heard over the years about adverts being targeted at people after they have (seemingly) related conversations.

Essentially, the big companies aren’t listening to your conversations (broadly speaking), they’re doing something else.

But it was great to see the concept outlined so clearly in a concise format (the Twitter thread) with a compelling and mildly humorous example attached.

As an example, if one of your friends has searched for new Nike trainers and they happen to message you about them, and then you start seeing Nike trainer ads, does that mean your messages were read by an intermediary?

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