[Buge]

Did you or your correspondent view a web page related to the product before or after the conversation? Viewing web pages is quite common.

Facebook also has a button next to ads saying why you were shown the ad. What does that say? Also the causation might be in the other direction. You and your correspondent might have seen an ad that then caused you to have the conversation.

[philliphaydon]

Nope. So my current apartment is on the 28th floor. It's common to have gates/grills on the windows here in Singapore. But this apartment, AFAIK the family didn't have kids so they never got it done.

So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"

Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.

[cranekam]

Are you sure you haven’t previously searched for window gates? Searching for things is so second nature by now that half the time we don’t even know we’re doing it.

Also, WhatsApp is definitely e2e encrypted. I worked there and saw the implementation (and the difficulties it causes for things like blocking spam/nasties) myself.

[gambiting]

Also, if your partner or anyone in your house searched for gates from the same IP, you will be getting ads for gates too, even if you never searched for them personally. That's a very common source of the "I never searched for something and now I'm getting ads for it" complaints.

[philliphaydon]

Positive that I didn't search. I viewed the apartment, and several others, while my wife was in Taiwan with our baby. After I got home (existing apartment in SG) I text (on whatsapp) the agent about this specific apartment. I had not even raise the issue of the lack of gates with my wife yet. The ad's began about an hour after I messaged my agent.

This was 1 year ago.

[bsaul]

couldn't have they added some kind of mechanidm to extract unusual words in the app itself to feed a separate stream of "interests" ? It doesn't even have to be sent over the network. Could be a shared file on an app group that apps like facebook read and process.

[Buge]

Your landlord might have immediately googled them and viewed some sites about them.

And do you and your landlord have the same internet connection?

How did you know gates are expensive?

[cranekam]

Sharing an internet connection isn’t enough for ads tracking, otherwise everyone behind the same NAT would get the same ads.

[jlokier]

IP address is one of many signals used to build a statistical profile.

It doesn't match you exactly to the other persons behind the same NAT, but it adds some information, raising the likelihood of ad coincidences a little. I have no idea how much. It's likely to depend on which IP address, and other tracking statistics.

If you have diligently blocked lots of tracking state, then IP address will be a relatively stronger signal, and this might (ironically) increase the likelihood of ad coincidences.

[rsfern]

I think this has started happening to me lately! I use pihole with the default block lists as well (in the US), which of course doesn’t get everything, but generally works pretty well.

So today my wife and I were looking at dogs that need forever homes using her laptop

Later I got a dog food ad on my laptop that specifically mentioned shelter rescue pets. I haven’t used any of my devices or accounts for dog-related searches for at least two months.

[beholder1]

Can keyboard be the cause? A spellchecker "stats collection" for example.