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by alex_g 1884 days ago
Purchased a hard kombucha at Whole Foods last week,

Ever since, about 1/3 of my instagram ads are for it. Never had an instagram ad for it before.

2 comments

Maybe the subtle influences that led you to buying such a drink in the first place are directly related to increased advertising for them. Also Amazon has your Whole Foods purchasing data, so that probably trickled down somewhere.
Technically my girlfriend purchased it with her Whole Foods/Amazon account, and she has not seen any ads.
The first part of your comment is gaslighting.

The second "trickled down somewhere" is the point.

A few potential reasons:

- You fit the demographic of Kombucha drinkers in your locality

- You visited a Kombucha blog/website recently that used retargeting to deliver an ad to your Instagram

- An initial ad that caught your attention and Instagram used “dwell time” to determine that the ad is relevant to you

Good points. I do fit the demographic, I have looked up pages related to Kombucha in the past (thought not in the last 6 months), and I did dwell on the first ad in amazement.

Still, I got home from the store and started seeing the ads immediately.

Have you spoke with someone about it? IOS and Android can easily analyze what you say and send relevant keywords home. This is very evil genius in a way that they do not send your voice feed neither your full sentences but only keywords that the law describe as "metatags" that courts found no to be an abuse of your 4A in the past.

In fact, you didn't even have to be on the phone. You could just come home and told you wife what you bough. That would be enough to send keywords and know what you maybe interested in. I know for fact my cable box (Spectrum) is listening and analyzing to my conversations. We used to talk with my wife about the most crazies stuff and less than 48 hours, Spectrum TV, Sling and YouTube would inject relevant ads. Some were extremely home made and amateurish but always spot on.

Do an experiment in home. Talk about something you dont have or is irrelevant to you. For example if you have no kids start talking about them. Use keywords like "our first child", "baby sitting", "hospital", "giving birth", "baby shower", I bet you less than 48 hours later your TV will be interrupting you with ads related to baby products; ads you have never seen before.

Do you have any evidence of iOS analyzing and transmitting keywords? It's one thing to say it's technically possible and another to say it's happening.
Honestly speaking, this is more scary than them actually stealing data.