The Illusion of Eavesdropping: Exploring Why Online Advertisements Appear to Know Your Preferences

Key Takeaways

• Ad coincidences are inevitable due to law of averages.
• We tend to notice hits and ignore misses, creating a false sense of surveillance.
• Algorithms predict preferences too accurately without the need for eavesdropping.

You’ve heard people say “I was just talking about this” when an ad pops up in their social media feed or on a new website they’ve visited, leading to the theory that you’re being spied on by your phone or computer in order to target ads at you. While this is technically possible, this feeling that we get is almost certainly the result of a little bit of psychology and a lot of random chance.

It’s Going to Happen Eventually

If you spend enough time browsing the internet, and see enough ads, then eventually you’re going to have a situation where a recent conversation you had within earshot of a microphone and an advert will coincide. This is just the law of averages at play, and it’s behind a lot of coincidences in our lives that our brains insist on telling us are more than a coincidence.

You Pay Special Attention When It Happens

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One of the reasons we feel these incidents are more than a coincidence is because of a natural tendency to pay attention to the hits and not the misses. That’s why we play the lottery, because we pay attention to the one person who wins the lottery and not the millions of people who don’t. So you spare no thought for the thousands of ads that don’t have any relationship to your conversations, but feel creeped out the few times these particular stars align for you.

You Might Be Stretching the Similarity

There’s also the power of our brains to draw connections between things that are nothing more than creative thinking. It’s one thing if you are talking about a specific thing like, say, the Samsung Galaxy Z-Flip 6 ,and then see an advert for it. However, if you just see adverts for phones in general, that doesn’t mean much.

The Algorithms Are Too Good Sometimes

The thing is, the people targeting you with adverts don’t need to listen in on your conversations in order to make scarily accurate inferences about you. The truth is that we aren’t as unique and special as we’d like to think. By knowing a bunch of circumstantial facts about you, such as your age, gender, politics, general interests, or which websites you like to visit, it’s possible to figure out that you’re in the market for something specific. Which means it’s likely you’ve spoken to someone about it at some point. In other words, whatever happens to be on your mind a lot is likely to be on the algorithm’s radar and a likely topic of discussion.

It doesn’t even have to be something targeted at you in particular. If there’s some major event going on, such as a big product launch or a popular TV show, or just something trending on social media, the likelihood of you both speaking about it with someone and it being presented to you in an advertising or social media feed becomes higher.

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No One Likes to Be a Number

I don’t like the idea that I’m predictable any more than the next person, but people are creatures of habit. We’re also creatures that are built to see patterns easily, even when there aren’t any. Alternatively, we’ll invent interpretations that make what we see fit whatever narrative we like. In short, things are stacked in such a way that the ads you see will sometimes make you feel like you’re being spied on.

Again, there’s no technical reason your phone or computer couldn’t be listening to your conversations and working out how to target you with ads, but apart from the legal ramifications, it just doesn’t make sense financially or in terms of the resources needed to make it work.