[batirch]

This happened to me in 2018. We were chatting with an acquaintance about horse racing. I never showed an interest in that topic or visited the location. Just after 5 mins he left I received an ad from Instagram on Horse Racing competition which was happening in the same city.

My only assumption was Instagram/Facebook was somehow listening our conversation.

[filoleg]

Were you friends with that acquaintance on fb/instagram? Were you on the same wifi/network?

If the answer to either of those two is "yes", and if your friend googled or liked/followed horse racing content on instagram/fb, then the algo can easily determine that indeed you might be interested in it and recommend it to you. Requires zero horse racing related searches on your own devices, just requires a person with a first degree connection to you doing those searches.

If the system knows that your close social link with some similar interests interacts (searching, reading, liking, following, chatting about online with others, etc.) a lot with a specific type of content, it is a pretty straightforward idea to suggest that specific type of content to you, even if you didn't interact with that type of content online yourself yet.

[Supermancho]

What's worse is that my wife and I were talking about particular states, then the spam calls we started to get had area codes from those states. Once is a coincidence. 5 times is a pattern.

Since we don't leave any apps open on our Android phones, we assume it's because Google was listening (their version of Siri is Bixby, which we use from time to time) then selling that information. It was probably a one-off, since this was only for a short window of time (2 weeks), but it was blatant.

[ffhhj]

I keep disabling Bixby permissions (x5 apps) and Android re-enables them on updates or whether I left some "allow to change system settings" checked, it's a huge information drainage.

[navjack27]

> we don't leave any apps open

So you force stop everything?

[Supermancho]

If we have to.