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My cousin told me his phone listens to him and now I can't unhear it
He pulled up his Facebook ads while we were at a cookout in Tulsa last month. Every single ad was for zero turn mowers. We had talked about mowers an hour before. Out loud. Phones on the table the whole time. I told him it was just good guessing since he browses mower stuff anyway. Then he opened his history and showed me he had never searched mowers once. Not one time. I still don't fully buy that the mic is always on, but I can't explain that either. My question is this, has anyone actually tested it with a clean phone and a fresh account? I want to try it myself but I don't know how to set it up so I trust the result.
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benb2117d ago
Picture this: you buy a burner phone, make a fake account, sit there whispering "zero turn mower" at it for an hour, and then you get ads for... zero turn mowers. Congrats, you just proved your phone is a tiny spy that also happens to know you're a weirdo. But for real, the setup is tricky because a clean phone still has Google or Apple baked in, and a fresh account on the same wifi and IP can still get linked to you. You'd basically need a whole separate device, new sim, new email, and to never log into anything you already own on it. Good luck explaining that purchase to your cousin without sounding like you're building a bunker.
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king.jordan17d ago
What about the wifi and IP part though, because that's the thing nobody talks about enough? Even if you do the whole burner phone and fake email thing, the second you connect to your home wifi you're basically standing in the same room as your old phone as far as the ad networks are concerned. They link devices by IP all the time, and locations get shared too when both phones are sitting on your kitchen counter overnight. So you'd have to take the burner somewhere else entirely, like a coffee shop or a park, and even then you're on some shared network where a hundred other people are also browsing. The only way to really trust the test is to do it in a place with zero connection to your normal life, and at that point you're driving across town to whisper about lawn equipment in a parking lot. That's the part that makes the whole experiment so hard to pull off clean.
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