IS Facebook Spying on You?

Have you ever had a conversation with someone about something random then mysteriously you see an ad pop up on your feed about that random topic?

I have and it freaks me out. It makes you think, are our phones listening in on our conversations to better target ads?

Facebook says denies spying on us.

We may believe that Facebook ads are tailored to us because of the Baader-Meinhof effect. The Baader-Meinhof effect is a cognitive bias where we believe we are seeing something more frequently after it’s been brought to our attention. For example, if you bought a new car, then suddenly you start seeing that car everywhere. More people didn’t suddenly go out and buy the car once you bought it, you just started noticing it more.

So where people might have seen the same ads before they might have just skipped over them since they didn’t have any relevance.

Others claim that Facebook is probably creating an idea of you and your interests based on your friends and what you and your friends are searching for online.

Not to be a conspiracist, but I’m with this guy. I still think my phone is listening in. I’ve just had this happen to me too many times about random topics for it to be a coincidence.

What do you think?