[baegi]

I have seen so many claims like this one, yet never any evidence of this sort of thing actually happening. I tend to believe this is a combination of confirmation bias and "side-channel" information like googling related things, or pattern recognition on the ad server's ML side (e.g. if you visit the amazon toilet paper section once a month, and after almost a month you start talking about toilet paper, getting served toilet paper ads might seem suspicious, but it really isn't).

Is there any actual information about this somewhere? With the insane breach of privacy policies and laws this would be, I would think many researchers would have looked into this by now.

[brookst]

No evidence I’ve ever seen, and people have looked at the communications pretty extensively. I think it’s hust a very compelling conspiracy theory born out of the “whatever you pay attentiom to seems to happen more” principle. My s/o became obsessed with the idea that Tesla cars are hugely dominant, and if you ask her Tesla probably has 90% market share, just because that’s all she sees.