My wife and I were watching John Wick and got to talking about owning a handgun. The next morning my facebook feed was showing me marketplace listings for holsters.
Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof effect: The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).[51] This illusion is sometimes referred to as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.[52]
Well this instance spooked me because I hadn't done any kind of lookup for anything "gun" related. While anything I search for is usually what shows up in my feeds. I'm usually not a "tin-hatter" and seems far-fetched, but it spooked me.
These kind of corrolation incidents are why the myth exists. The truth is that advertising companies like Facebook don't need to listen to us. They already know more than enough personal information about us to target ads.
Shame about your downvotes -- I guess people don't want to believe that vac. scepticism can be a reasonable conclusion from limited evidence.
Well: it is. Autism is a childhood disorder (therefore) whose symptoms usually follow vaccination. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize a causal link.
It may be unreasonable to maintain it in light of other evidence (eg., no difference in rate amongst the non-vax'd). But people don't live in the macro (ie., comparative contexts) they live in the micro (ie., their own experience). And its hard to communicate macros to micros.
For me, until now, this kind of target has only lead to funny anecdotes. Like telling a friend on Whatsapp I just bought new shirt only to receive shirt ads for weeks. Well, too late. Another one is receiving cat food ads because I send a pic of the cat I was feeding while a friend was in vacation. Fail again, I do not own a cat. Good try anyway.
But I recon, you're case is creepy. But more likely that the VOD service you use sent data to Facebook.
The information that you've watched that movie likely went into the ad-placement algorithm and it then may have decided that you could be interested in guns.
Now, is this reassuring? Maybe the ad-placement algorithm with all the data available is much better at knowing who you are and what you want that than recording audio, and extracting meaning from it.
From an advertisement standpoint, there is so much noise in a microphone signal. It would be helpful for large-scale surveillance so a human could pin-point individual persons-of-interest and listen to what they're saying (big brother style). But that's not how advertisements work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Or maybe you watched john wick on netflix or amazon and boom.