There has definitely been cases where I have not looked up an idea at all on my devices, only mentioned it in speech at home, and the highly targeted at shows up on mobile the next day or even that day. I would take the correlation theory if I actually left data to correlate.
This... I have had on at least 2 occasions explicitly where I know for a fact I hadn't searched or looked up this topic on any system, and I brought up a topic and talked to my roommate and within the next 12 hours FB served me ads or content relating to the topic.
I get the idea that an "always on" monitoring system would be problematic (even if you discarded the data itself and only retained/filtered relevant bits for a short period of time). But ... I have no other way to explain events like this.
I suppose some weird correlation of user has x,y,z and they searched for a,b,c in the past, and other users search for D, then we show D at exactly the 12 hour time they searched for it.
Yes I am aware of recency bias, and how perhaps it was shown other times without recognizing it. But it's... hard to shake that feeling, and I am (well less so now) a skeptic...
If it's anything it's like AI that's eerily creepy like "intelligence" but not it, just like this is "like listening" but isn't. Both use statistical models to do creepy ass shit.
Did the roommate use the same WiFi network as you, and your roommate used the WiFi to research it?
Well, since my data comes from my wife and I (we have nobody else) and we didn't look up Deadpool (ever) because she doesn't care and I don't talk to her about it because I know she doesn't care. We see Deadpool advertised playing at a theater on the marqui, so I call it out
Me: "I would go watch Deadpool with my best friend Z if he was in town today".
Me: "Did you hear they have a Deadpool dog? Dogpool!" (saw the trailer from my desktop at work)
Wife: "I don't care about a Deadpool dog. You should definitely go see it with Z."
About 2 hours later. Ads for Deadpool litter her Facebook. Deadpool had been out for 2 weeks. Why now? Because we talked about it in the car while she was on Facebook. I've worked in Adtech since about 2005. It's the phone and or the app. Our Google TV does the same thing, except Youtube doesn't seem to be affected by conversation. So that's something.
But why did you mention it at all?
That’s the point the article makes: That some idea is on your mind is essentially always correlated with any number of signals, some of which are visible or inferable by adtech.