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My hypothesis is that it's not listening nor is it predicting based on the individual, instead it's reacting to web surfing behaviors of your associates. For example, you and your partner use the same wifi at home a lot, and you both visit a close friend's house and use their wifi every time you're there. Services that you use in both places (e.g. Facebook, Google) now have a graph where there's a very strong link between you and your partner, and a weaker but still important link between the two residential IP addresses. Now you're at home, just had dinner with your partner, and you say you are considering buying a guitar. An hour later you open your phone and see ads for guitars. "Honey, did you search for guitars already?" "No, why?" "Oh no! It heard me! Or it knows me too well! Uninstall all your apps!" No, what happened is that last night you were at that friend's house, told your friend about your guitar desires, and all morning that friend has been doing a bit of market research themselves, perhaps to see what you're on about and maybe consider getting it for you. The graph connects the dots, and advertisers suspect that perhaps guitar ads should go not only to your friend, but also to you (by that weak association) just in case you might be the one who buys the guitar. The uncanniness is a function of you having no idea that your friend was building up this slight likelihood that you're about to buy a guitar, combined with even a very weak signal poking out above the noise given no other recent signals. |
Male, 40+? A bit more likely than the average human to have a mini mid-life crisis and decide to buy an electric guitar.
These platforms suggest SO many ads to us that even if 99% of the suggestions are total junk that we ignore without even registering, the 1% that represent a lucky roll of the dice still really stick in our memories.