[5trokerac3]

You'll commonly hear these stories brushed off with, "these companies have so much metadata on you that they can know what you'll look for before you do."

I don't buy it - at least not fully. There are too many stories of totally random stuff talked about showing up in feeds to make this excuse totally plausible.

Hell, it was less than a year ago that you'd get brushed off with, "no, people aren't listening to the things you're saying to your home device, it's only run through NLP."

[behringer]

In a sense they do know what you'll do. What happens in some of these cases like with OP is they'll see a doritos ad, then they'll buy or talk about doritos. Then they'll see another ad and get freaked out.

[dymk]

Literally none of these companies were claiming your last "brush off".

[5trokerac3]

Not anymore they aren't, but they were when the last gen of listening devices were launched.